A Geographical Approach to Socio-ecological Coviability

International audienceThe scientific debate on global ecological change which originates in human activity is dominated by concepts belonging to biological and physical sciences. When these concepts are applied to the social sphere, they distort its analysis. Moreover, a growing number of researchers in social sciences are naturalizing the societies/environments relations by using these concepts without deeply investigating them. Because these approaches seem to me scientifically biased by a naturalizing ideology, I suggest a geographical approach of the socio-ecological co-viability, which necessitates redefining few disciplinary concepts. A geographical analysis supported by other social sciences unveils the naturalizing ideology of social-ecological systems (SES); this concept forms the basis of socio-ecological co-viability. The naturalization of social events manifests itself in three common ideas concerned with SES: first, societies may be analyzed as ecosystems; second, SES have a cyclical history; third, their extension and geographic location have scarce importance. To illustrate, Easter Island represents an ecological and social collapse embodying how the concept of socio-ecological co-viability deals with geo-historical movements. The causes of this collapse do not emanate from Rapanui’s SES but from the geographical openings of Easter Island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, this investigation examines the appropriate geographical conditions of a socio-ecological co-viability in an “era of globalization.