The hybrids, the geography of nature and environment

In the Anthropocene era, the transformation of material nature by societies is increasingly being assimilated. To describe this new situation, following the work of M. Serres and B. Latour, many studies suggest considering the contemporary nature as the result of hybridation of nature and culture. This statement is now increasingly being assimilated by the community of geographers to describe our contemporary situation. But what are hybrids and what is their place in geography? The Authors focus the analysis on how the concept finds its place in the environmental field addressed in geography by naturalistic or constructivist approaches and in a few related disciplines. This leads to four observations. (1) Geography has long demonstrated that the environment is made up of hybrids that can only be understood by placing them in space and time. (2) Naturalist approaches to geography remind us that these hybrids have a material dimension and that we can describe as hybrids not only the systems (geosystems, anthroposystems, socio-ecological systems) but also the elementary objects that make them up (sediment, tree, etc.) that are ontologically socionatural. (3) The terms regularly used must be clarified. We are not working on hybrids of nature and culture, but on hybrids between physicochemical, biological and social processes, and differentiation is more a methodological distinction than an ontological one. (4) The review shows that the project remains the study of phenomena that are social or biophysical or their interactions or a socio-political project focused on understanding the political forces that are at play in environmental issues and hybridization seems either implicit or obvious and remains a general frame of reference rather than a scientific and programmatic issue. Based on our research focused on the study of riverscape, the Authors show that our materiality is composed of objects that are hybrids by construction or metabolism. For this reason, the article proposes to keep an intradisciplinary space open in geography to articulate all the dimensions necessary for their understanding. By hybridizing geography, we hope to contribute to the defining of new research approaches in order to understand the production of contemporary materiality, which seems to us to be today’s challenge.