On this page, you will find some key resources in English, notably on robustness and common health, two concepts that the Michel Serres institute developed in the footsteps of Michel Serres’ Natural contract.
When are we?
Humans have used their knowledge to exploit ecosystems. In the Anthropocene, this trajectory leads us to reach, and even exceed, planetary boundaries.
The future of our civilization will depend on our ability to reverse this paradigm, in particular by creating the conditions for humans to reconnect with Earth.
Consequently, scientific research must serve to increase human understanding of natural resources and to design a robust and responsible use of them for the benefit of all.
A race towards optimization and performance
To understand some of the roots of this trajectory, let’s go back to 1914, in an essentially rural France. At that time, Taylorism was not widespread. Everything changed in the arms factories between 1914 and 1918, where the shells were manufactured on supply chains. In 1919, peace returned, most factories no longer manufactured bombs, but they kept their efficient Taylorist operation.
Later, during the Vietnam War, the first container ships were used to supply the American army. To optimize these long journeys, ships did not return empty from Vietnam: on the way back, they passed through Japan in order to import goods to the United States. In 1975 the war stopped but this optimized trade continued; globalization by container ships was born.
The increase in efficiency constitutes a too strong attractor. We rarely backtrack on such increments. Thus, are we doomed to be more and more efficient?
Life is suboptimal
Living things are not optimal; on the contrary, they are suboptimal. Take body temperature: at 37 ° C, most of the enzymes in our body are not at their maximal activity. When fever arrives, some of these proteins reach their optimum, the immune system works at full speed. However, when the fever subsides, our body returns to the suboptimal norm.
Efficiency is not the common denominator of life. In fact, living beings are relatively inefficient. This is in particular what the latest advances in molecular biology, computational modeling or microscopy tell us: at the molecular level, living systems are very random, redundant, heterogeneous, inconsistent… in short, not very efficient.
But how can this work? The interaction between weaknesses creates new balances. For instance, most of the molecular factors in our cells are in very small numbers, which partly explains the unpredictability of living beings, even at that scale. However, there is great redundancy in these families of molecules and in biological processes, which partly compensates for randomness. Finally, two « weaknesses », randomness and redundancy, balance each other. It is a bit like a car, where acceleration and braking allows a stable speed regardless of the slope of the road. For living beings, the maintenance of such autonomy allows robustness in the face of environmental fluctuations.
The new robust world to come
Agroecology makes it possible to illustrate the balance between robustness and performance on a more comprehensible scale. The ultra-efficient monocultures are heavily criticized today because of these negative externalities and are gradually replaced by varietal mixtures. Those are suboptimal versions of field crops. Indeed, by sowing different varieties of wheat, the yield is not maximal. But the genetic diversity of the field allows plants to cope better with environmental hazards: interactions between species generate synergies to fight against pathogens or against drought. The yield is not maximal, but it is more stable.
Finally, suboptimality is a great support for adaptive capacities: living systems can get around difficulties, not because they are well prepared, but rather because they are always in a dynamic state, exploring many possible paths. Evolution has not chosen efficiency as an unsurpassable compass, but resilience, that is, the ability to survive environmental fluctuations and to transform itself if conditions require it.
The peace of tomorrow
The Covid-19 period has laid bare our socio-economic systems. In fact, it was not necessary to wait for this virus to question the dysfunctions of a society that has become too efficient. This is actually what Ivan Illich already denounced with the concept of « counter-productivity ». Other forms of resistance have emerged. Carlo Petrini questioned the absurd performance of fast food, and invented “slow food” in reaction. Likewise, landscaper Gilles Clément created a new garden, against the aberrations of ornamental excellence enforced by mass destruction and chemical weapons. The chamber of the future proposed by Dominique Bourg is part of the same movement. Finally, the adaptability of life could teach us a lot to build a civilization of peace, where robustness would become our new compass. Beyond pandemics and economic crises, inventing this society could become inevitable: we will have to broaden our adaptation skills to face the vast and unpredictable challenges of the Anthropocene.
Where to next? Common health
Combining the natural contract and this intimate need for an organic link to the Earth, we propose common health as a transformative paradigm, based on the « law » of needs and resources, and building a sustainable economic model.
This does not mean reducing the socio-ecological issue to a medical one, but returning to the WHO’s original definition of health as « a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being ». Nor is it a question of greening health, but rather of weaving transversal and interdependent links between (i) human health (as defined above by the WHO as early as 1946), (ii) the health of societies (notably through universal protection guaranteeing shared rights and equitable access to resources, as defined by the ILO in 2014), (iii) the health of natural environments (notably the right to a healthy environment, enabled by the integrity of ecosystems over the long term, as defined by the UN as early as 1948). This triptych can become operative if its hierarchical ontology is assumed: the health of natural environments shapes social health, which in turn shapes human health. The three healths are indivisible, unalterable and intertwined. In the final analysis, we need to move away from a superficial accounting vision of our « environment » (too often limited to equivalents in tonnes of CO2 emitted), and embrace our environment, and its complexity, in our deepest intimacy.
However, common health care would remain an orphan if it were merely declarative. To be transformative, it must guide economic trajectories in an operational way. To this end, we have built a tool that can be used to assess a project at local level – a company, an association or a local authority – in terms of common health. The aim is (i) to identify and validate its structuring impacts on the three health pillars (human, social and natural), without exception, (ii) to guarantee lasting benefits for the three pillars of the natural environment (water, soil, biomass), without exception and without forgetting the marine environment, and (iii) to confirm its validity over a fluctuating long term by means of a robustness test (failing country, war or excessively fluctuating socio-economic context). If only two of the three health parameters are positively impacted, or if the robustness test is unsatisfactory, we’ll have to go back to the drawing board.
Among the many solutions available, this simple tool helps to make a pragmatic and informed choice, taking into account local constraints and parameters. It evolves the chosen solutions through successive iterations, helping to identify a robust economic and ecological trajectory.
How to get involved?
Check out our page « S’impliquer » for more resources (albeit in French). In a nutshell, the Michel Serres institute offers 4 ways to get involved on this path towards robustness and common health:
- Think Tank: Help by feeding the concepts with your own experience, with contradictory examples, etc. Help us make the theory more robust!
- Formations: Get involved in the different formations that are currently blooming around common health and robustness, and develop your own?
- First steps: Share inspiring projects, learn from others, and test the « common health tool » in 4 steps: (i) question the question, (ii) go through an internal audit of robustness, (iii) check that your project feeds human & social & natural health, (iv) pass the stress test
- Debates: Learn and contribute to debates trhough our tribunes and events.
Conferences in English
Michel Serres Institute Youtube channel
Portail des Humanités environnementales (video examples in English):
Books in English
Several books from members of the Michel Serres institute have been translated in English:
The natural contract
Global environmental change, argues Michel Serres, has forced us to reconsider our relationship to nature. In this translation of his influential 1990 book Le Contrat Naturel, Serres calls for a natural contract to be negotiated between Earth and its inhabitants.
World history is often referred to as the story of human conflict. Those struggles that are seen as our history must now include the uncontrolled violence that humanity perpetrates upon the earth, and the uncontrollable menace to human life posed by the earth in reaction to this violence. Just as a social contract once brought order to human relations, Serres believes that we must now sign a « natural contract » with the earth to bring balance and reciprocity to our relations with the planet that gives us life. Our survival depends on the extent to which humans join together and act globally, on an earth now conceived as an entity.
Tracing the ancient beginnings of modernity, Serres examines the origins and possibilities of a natural contract through an extended meditation on the contractual foundations of law and science. By invoking a nonhuman, physical world, Serres asserts, science frees us from the oppressive confines of a purely social existence, but threatens to become a totalitarian order in its own right. The new legislator of the natural contract must bring science and law into balance.
Serres ends his meditation by retelling the story of the natural contract as a series of parables. He sees humanity as a spacecraft that with the help of science and technology has cast off from familiar moorings. In place of the ties that modernity and analytic reason have severed, we find a network of relations both stranger and stronger than any we once knew, binding us to one another and to the world. The philosopher’s harrowing and joyous task, Serres tells us, is that of comprehending and experiencing the bonds of violence and love that unite us in our spacewalk to the spaceship Mother Earth.
Antidote to the cult of performance
Socio-ecological disruption is no longer a prediction; it is a reality, punctuated by crises. In response, we produce sustainable development, a prescription for sobriety and rising levels of ecoanxiety.
But what if we were on the wrong track? Scientific reports agree that the twenty-first century will be turbulent. Our only certainty is that uncertainty will persist and that it will increase. In the face of such fluctuation, control, optimization and performance are locking us into a very fragile and narrow path. Robustness – keeping the system stable despite fluctuations – is the operational response to turbulence.
Unlike performance, robustness opens up possibilities and reconnects us to living organisms, which are robust in essence. Furthermore, recent advances in biology also provide us with an important key: robustness is built first and foremost on heterogeneity, redundancy, randomness, waste, slowness, incoherence… in short, robustness is the antithesis of performance. The shift towards robustness reverses all the paradigms of our time and helps us move beyond an epidemic of burnout. With no regrets.
The benefits of imperfection
The cult of performance leads our society to emphasise the values of success and continuous optimisation in all areas. Slowness, redundancy and randomness are therefore negatively perceived. Olivier Hamant, in this book, attempts to rehabilitate them by his knowledge of biological processes. What can we learn from life sciences? While some biological mechanisms certainly boast formidable efficiency, recent advances instead highlight the fundamental role of errors, incoherence and slowness in the development and the robustness of living organisms. Should life be considered suboptimal? To what extent could suboptimality become a counter-model to the credo of performance and control in the Anthropocene? In the face of pessimistic observations and environmental alerts, the author outlines solutions for a future that is viable and reconciled with nature.
Your life in numbers
More than 300 years ago, Isaac Newton created a mathematical model of the solar system that predicted the existence of a yet unknown planet: Neptune. Today, driven by the digital revolution, modern scientists are creating complex models of society itself to shed light on topics as far-ranging as epidemic outbreaks and economic growth. But how do these scientists gather and interpret their data? How accurate are their models? Can we trust the numbers? With a rare background in physics, economics and sociology, the author is able to present an insider’s view of the strengths, weaknesses and dangers of transforming our lives into numbers. After reading this book, you’ll understand how different numerical models work and how they are used in practice. The author begins by exploring several simple, easy-to-understand models that form the basis for more complex simulations. What follows is an exploration of the myriad ways that models have come to describe and define our world, from epidemiology and climate change to urban planning and the world chess championship. Highly engaging and nontechnical, this book will appeal to any readers interested in understanding the links between data and society and how our lives are being increasingly captured in numbers.
Form, Art and the Environment
Form, Art and the Environment : Engaging in Sustainability adopts a pluralistic perspective of environmental artistic processes in order to examine the contributions of the arts in promoting sustainable development and culture at a grassroots level and its potential as a catalyst for social change and awareness. This book investigates how community arts, environmental creativity, and the changing role of artists in the Polis contribute to the goal of a sustainable future from a number of interdisciplinary perspectives. From considering the role that art works play in revealing local environmental problems such as biodiversity, public transportation and energy issues, to examining the way in which artists and art works enrich our multidimensional understanding of culture and sustainable development, Form, Art and the Environment advocates the inestimable value of art as an expressive force in promoting sustainable culture and conscious development. Utilising a broad range of case studies and analysis from a body of work collected through the international environmental COAL prize, this book examines the evolution of the relationship between culture and the environment. This book will be of interest to practitioners of the environmental arts, culture and sustainable development and students of Art, Environmental Science, and International Policy and Planning Development.
Renewable energy sources and Climate change mitigation
This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SRREN) assesses the potential role of renewable energy in the mitigation of climate change. It covers the six most important renewable energy sources – bioenergy, solar, geothermal, hydropower, ocean and wind energy – as well as their integration into present and future energy systems. It considers the environmental and social consequences associated with the deployment of these technologies and presents strategies to overcome technical as well as non-technical obstacles to their application and diffusion. SRREN brings a broad spectrum of technology-specific experts together with scientists studying energy systems as a whole. Prepared following strict IPCC procedures, it presents an impartial assessment of the current state of knowledge : it is policy relevant but not policy prescriptive. SRREN is an invaluable assessment of the potential role of renewable energy for the mitigation of climate change for policymakers, the private sector and academic researchers.