This thematic area is concerned with the interaction of the physical environment with forms of life. It proposes less the different natures of the two spatial types, than their reciprocal meeting points, their intersections, and the passage from the one to the other. If it is true that the desert of sand is not an area designed exclusively by geology and the climate, it is equally true that rural spaces are not created solely by humans but also by a series of natural constraints and opportunities. The social, economic, cultural and political implications linked to the figures of the nomad and the peasant are seen as the semiotics of subjectification.

Labor-in-Nature and Nature-in-Labor, a coinage taken from Jason W. Moore, focuses on forces of production (commodification) and on the relations of production (appropriation, exploitation, accumulation) linked to modern ideas of nature. It is only by overcoming the hegemonic vision of nature as separate from humankind (that has been the lifeblood of capitalism) that we can acknowledge how, production forces –historically determined– have encompassed human (women, slaves, children) and extra-human (animals, forests, waterways, the land) nature.

This area intervenes at the level of mental ecology deconstructing the opposition between phonemes and graphemes, orality and writing, and the prejudices of a logocentrism, which in the West has defined what takes place in and beyond history. Considering voice without language a language without a voice, directly involves the questions of the production and reproduction of knowledge and, as a consequence, the dimensions of politics.

This thematic approach discusses associations and the associative forms of living beings: from the micro-social to the institutional scale. The concept of community on which modernity is founded (and through which extra-human nature is also considered) is based on the idea of a common and shared world in which the condition of equality is indivisible from that of identity and belonging. For this reason, the relation between minorities and a majority does nothing but infinitely reproduce the dialectics between integration and exclusion. The idea of multiplicity, at the base of social ecology, does not permit, on the contrary, any concept of a majority.