Réponses culturelles aux changements rapides de la nature

In view of the changes in climate that our society will face in the near future, issues related to vulnerability and resilience have become of paramount importance. Until now, efforts to enhance resilience have focused on the strengthening of physical and social infrastructures. The improvement of physical structures, such as dikes to protect areas against flooding from rivers and storm surges from the sea, is under development. There also are ongoing discussions about changes in social structures necessary in order to address social consequences of climate change, such as increases in migration flows provoked by disastrous events due to severe droughts and flooding, symptomatic of climate change in some geographical areas. Clearly, it is of crucial importance to start planning for consequent changes in various sectors of society, such as public health, economics, finance, insurance, and so on. Nonetheless, there is reason to consider a more general perspective on adaptation to disastrous natural events, which goes beyond approaches limited to the reform of specific physical and social infrastructures. In this paper I propose to address a different perspective from the one that is common in our societies. Within the so-called Western societies, initiatives aimed at prevention of threats to society generally are aimed to reform existing structures within a “modern” cultural framework, which sees natural phenomena either as simple resources or, alternatively, as obstacles, to human happiness. At least up to the present, the question of the role of cultural factors in the face of vulnerability to climate change remains fairly little discussed. In particular, there is a need to clarify how beliefs, values, practices and habits, as well as technology and other aspects of material culture, interact with the behaviour of individuals and social groups who face the challenges posed by the consequences of climate change. It is proposed here that the clarification of the cultural factors that contribute to vulnerability, as well as to the resilience, of our societies can generate valuable additional approaches to strengthen people's ability to cope with the foreseeable difficulties resulting from climate change. Changes and severe disturbances in climate that change the frequency or intensity of storms, floods, droughts, and so on, are not a new phenomenon in human experience. The human responses to changes, and to extremes in variability, of climate, as manifested in various parts of the globe and throughout both historical and prehistoric periods, are increasingly a topic of research. Within the necessarily limited framework of this paper, we introduce some considerations about a particular way of responding to potentially disastrous natural events, taking as our example the cultural perspectives of certain indigenous people from North America’s northwestern region. Anthropological research has determined that the activities of these people in relation to natural phenomena were guided by certain principles of respect and responsibility, generally disregarded in our modern societies. According to these principles, we should leave a space for the expression of natural phenomena that can drastically affect human activities. While these ideas may perhaps appear outlandish at first, it is argued here that, in practice, this kind of alternative approach can lead to useful policy, capable of strengthening the resilience of people confronted with natural events problematic for humans. In summary, we propose that reflecting on the cultural dimension of responses to natural phenomena can give us a new perspective, with important practical implications for our modern Western societies