Michel Serres and the reinvention of ecological thought
Revolutionary thinking is needed in our time of crisis.
On the very first page of his inspirational book Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane refers to a philosopher who has influenced his research: Michel Serres. Macfarlane writes that all three of the landscapes he goes on to explore “become a focus for revolutionary thinking about what the philosopher Michel Serres called the natural contract.”
The reader might ask, “Who is this ‘revolutionary’ thinker?” However, the philosopher’s name does not surface again in the book.
Michel Serres, who published over 70 books, is belatedly gaining some recognition in the academic world, but his work should be read and discussed more widely. What follows presents snapshots of three of his interconnected ideas, all of which have increasing relevance for the ongoing climate crisis and our broader planetary emergency: a natural contract, a common story, and the formation of a new global politics.
A natural contract
According to Serres, we have broken from the deep alliances and interdependencies that allow nature to sustain itself.”
Serres died in 2019 at the age of 88. His philosophy draws from diverse perspectives in ecology, law, science, the humanities, other “ways of knowing,” his humble rural upbringing, and his experience as a sailor. As indicated by Macfarlane, Serres’s best-known proposal concerns the forming of a “natural contract.” Serres investigated the transformation of humanity into a parasite on Earth, endlessly taking and giving nothing back. According to Serres, we have broken from the deep alliances and interdependencies that allow nature to sustain itself. As we wage war, as we devour each other and the Earth’s resources. As we destroy the habitat that we share with all living things, Serres urged us to forge a new global contract that encompasses the whole of nature.
Serres’s book The Natural Contract, published nearly 40 years ago, anticipated advances in ecological jurisprudence and the rights of nature movements, but it is even more expansive in scope. He called for the recognition of the whole Earth and all living things as legal subjects. In Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent, Serres wrote: “To the scandal of many, I once proposed to accord ‘nature’ the status of a legal subject. Understand this term in the exact sense: things and persons to be born.”
Serres’s understanding of the term “nature” is important. He returns to the root of the word, which comes from the Latin natura, referring to “birth.” Nature is a process of generation and regeneration—discovery and invention. Nature is always being born, diverging, deviating, and creating. Serres’s legal proposal recognizes this. We are a tiny, destructive speck of nature. As he says in The Natural Contract, if we wish to continue our place in the story of nature, we must generate “peace among ourselves to protect the world, and peace with the world to protect ourselves.”
The great story
The natural contract gains more traction in the context of another major theme of Serres’s philosophy. He unfolds the “Great Story” (Le Grand Récit), a common account of the origins of everything that—although it emerges from more recent scientific discoveries—Serres traces through ancient myths and many forms of literature. Many asked who would “sign” his natural contract. Would we ask the sea, rivers, birds, or animals to get out their pens? However, Le Grand Récit describes how the contract is already written in the processes, the codes, and forms of communication of all things. Influenced by Aldo Leopold’s Think Like a Mountain, in one of his most biographical books, Biogea, Serres describes this language in terms of the force of gravity, the memory of mountains, the sound of the sea, the patterns of DNA, the songs of birds, and the howl of wolves.
Serres’s work does significantly resemble the universal narratives advanced by the International Big History Association as well as the work of Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and Joanna Macy. However, Le Grand Récit is distinctive in both its capacity to reframe the law under the natural contract and Serres’s understanding that the abuse of the planet cannot be separated from our abuse of one another.
Toward a new politics
In his later work, Serres increasingly turned to political questions, promising books on religion and politics. He completed the former days before he died, but the latter was never written. His political stance is revolutionary and utopian, with some similarities to Slavoj Žižek’s aim of redefining the limits of the possible. In a more playful vein, Serres sketched out the possibility of a new global political institution that he calls WAFEL, based on the English initials for water, air, fire, earth, and life.
In a more playful vein, Serres sketched out the possibility of a new global political institution that he calls WAFEL, based on the English initials for water, air, fire, earth, and life.”
Unlike Bruno Latour, who set out many detailed proposals for a government of all living things, WAFEL is evocative rather than practical. In Times of Crisis, Serres imagines WAFEL as involving the Life and Earth Sciences (LESC). These disciplines would form a global “cognition”—a “multi-disciplinary federation” that could act as a voice of nature’s alliances. Serres’s hope was based on his perception of the LESC as part of a wider trend, through which many sciences could become a form of “ecology.” At the same time, he described many sciences as becoming storytellers of the world.
Revolutionary ideas for our time
In Thinking Like a Planet, the ecological philosopher J. Baird Callicott argues that Serres’s proposals are “truly remarkable” but that he “has been little appreciated in the Anglophone community.” It is past time for his work to be valued in the academic sphere, but, far more importantly, it must reach the wider public. Serres distrusted the academic world and the often specialist words that he claimed served only to exclude people from the conversation.
Further, because Serres persistently questioned the uniqueness of our present era, his proposals thoroughly challenge current debates on how we reached, and how we should respond to, our planetary emergency. His arguments for a contract that embraces the more-than-human, his evocation of the common story of everything, and his insistence that we demand the impossible—working towards global assemblies that voice the Earth and living things—are all revolutionary.
Serres contended that we need to redefine what it means to be human, understanding ourselves as guests on the planet rather than the host. The task is not to save the planet but to find ways to continue the adventure of nature.
This piece is based on research conducted for a website run by Dr. Peter Johnson and various academic journal articles, including the freely available review of Serres’s later books in environmental humanities.
