Carnets de Géographes (Dec 2023)
Agir pour l’environnement… Oui, mais lequel ?
Abstract
We usually know for whom, for what and why people work... but we never ask « for where » and « with where » we actually work. What are the upstream and downstream spaces that make our work possible ? After justifying the conceptual hypothesis of « metabolic work », I present different scales and different relations to space that accompany volunteer clean-up actions in Lyon, Vienna and Athens. I critically analyse that these actions, if they produce an effective relation to the environment, only make the planetary scale the relevant scale to deal with the « waste problem ». The clean-up actions don’t allow people to know and understand, at the urban scale, that the problem of waste is not only its presence in public space, but also the way it is managed and produced. In this sense, we speak of territorial ignorance and we believe that this form of ignorance hinders any serious political discussion on waste.
