The consequences of the increasingly striking interventions by humans on their living environment, with the various types of pollution that they entail, bring us to question the causes of those destructive uses of the biosphere. It is not until Buffon that we find a direct opposition between the power of Man and the power of Nature, both endowed with a capital letter. Faced with such an ideological opposition and its practical consequences, it may be useful to adopt an anthropological approach, an approach to the representations and practices found in another culture, removed from our own in space and/or time, in a process of differential and critical comparison with our own paradigm. Here the various ancient Greek conceptions of phusis as the Promethean conception fo the technai can help us to open up new critical perspectives, in an anthropopoietic and ecopoietic way, about the reciprocal relationships of human beings with their environment.
Elizabeth Upenieks
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