Reflections for re-in-root: Case sudies

Faced with the questions that beset us in the current crises, it seems interesting to resort to part of the work of Simone Weil, who writes about an uprooted civilization. Her work is a call to rise up against injustice and oppression, and as such appears as a source of questioning in terms of authenticity. Simone Weil [1909-1943], a philosopher, professor of philosophy, a factory worker to experience the conditions of the factory, and a farm worker at the end of her life, offers a fruitful thought, some elements of which we present from three of her works, focusing on her notion of rootedness, which can be used by our civilization, which in many respects can be described as uprooted, to refl ect on ways to re-root.

https://www.peertechz.com/journals/global-journal-of-ecology Citation: Grégory  clock. A uniformity that imitates the movements of clocks and not those of constellations, a variety that excludes all rules and consequently all forecasting, makes time uninhabitable to man, unbreathable" [1].
To fi ght against this uprooting, Simone Weil proposes a civilization based on agricultural work, so that man is in tune with the needs of the world, rooted in cosmic and ecological forces, as she expresses it in the following words: "for the peasants, everything should have as its centre the marvelous circuit by which the solar energy, descended into the plants, fi xed by chlorophyll, concentrated in the seeds and fruits, enters the man who eats or drinks, passes through his muscles and is spent for the development of the earth. Everything related to science can be arranged around this circuit, because the notion of energy is at the centre of everything. The thought of this circuit, if it penetrated the minds of the peasants, would envelop the work of poetry. Generally speaking, the essential purpose of any instruction in the villages should be to increase sensitivity to the beauty of the world, to the beauty of nature" [2]. But in terms of poetry evoking solar energy, his writing also culminates in this other excerpt. "We do not live on anything but solar energy; we eat it, and it is it that keeps us upright, that moves our muscles, that bodily operates in us all our actions.
It is perhaps, in various forms, the only thing in the universe that constitutes a force antagonistic to gravity; it is the energy that climbs trees, that lifts burdens with our arms, that moves our motors. It comes from a source that is inaccessible and that we cannot get even one step closer to. It continually descends upon us. But even though it constantly bathes us, we cannot catch it. Only the vegetal principle of chlorophyll can capture it for us and make it our food. It is only necessary that the earth be suitably arranged by our efforts; then, through chlorophyll, the solar energy becomes a solid thing and enters into us as bread, as wine, as oil, as fruit. All the peasant's work consists in caring for and serving this vegetable virtue which is a perfect image of Christ" [1].

Uprooting
However, with intensive agriculture, the negative aspects of worker labour denounced by Weil were able to catch up with peasant labour [4]. Hasn't today's agriculture lost its way in the throes of the exacerbated productivism of the agrifood industries? Moreover, Weil foresaw the increase in this uprooting process. "The problem of peasant uprooting is no less serious than that of worker uprooting. Although it is less advanced, it is even more scandalous, for it is unnatural for the land to be cultivated by uprooted people" [2]. It states factors of peasant uprooting; for example, the fact that "as far as the things of the spirit are concerned, peasants have been brutally uprooted by the modern world" [2], or again: "yet another kind of uprooting must be studied for a summary knowledge of our main disease. It is uprooting that could be called geographical, that is, in relation to communities that correspond to territories" [2].
Our hypothesis in the rest of the Weilian refl ection is therefore that human oppression applies not only to other oppressed men but now also to "nature", so much so that we can use Voltaire's word in Candide to say that the globe can be seen today as a "globule". From a deep-rooted relationship to the living world, or even to the earth as an organism [5], man has extracted himself to make our earth once again a "closed world", closed in a cold and inhospitable space, and his life also a restricted space, short-sighted, with no distant horizons, whose gaze is therefore closed by a box of screens.
Man conceives them as "windows on the world", but they are only "animated shutters" sending back to him his own vanities and desires of excess, cut off from "nature", to the point that the anthropocene comes to banish the possibility of a life for the next generations. Man, unable to continue his conquest of space, becomes the "colonizer" of time.
From this perspective, science, which was part of the idea of progress stemming from the Enlightenment, has it not become the last avatar of post-modern societies, about which Beck [6] enlightens us. In this respect, the preface written by Bruno Latour states: "unlike all cultures and all previous phases of evolution, society today is confronted with itself.
There is no longer anything external to the social world.
Nature, in turn, which has long since become second nature, is integrated into political and social debates. There are no longer any reservations about rejecting the "collateral damage" of our actions. Corporations have become risk factories" [6] also refers to the new threat this creates by mentioning "the strange mixture between nature and society, in which danger overrides anything that might resist it. It is fi rst of all the hybrid fi gure of the "radioactive cloud", that instance of civilization transformed into a natural power in which history and meteorology are based in a unity that is as paradoxical as it is powerful. This experience, which for a moment shattered what had made our lives until then, refl ects the impotence of the world industrial system in the face of industrially integrated and contaminated "nature". The opposition between nature and society is a nineteenth-century construct that served a dual purpose: it allowed nature to be dominated and ignored.
At the end of the twentieth century, nature is being subjected and exploited, and it has been transformed from an external phenomenon into an internal phenomenon, from the given into the constructed. Dependence on consumption and the market is, once again, in a new form, dependence on "nature", and its immanent dependence on the market system in relation to nature becomes, in and with the market system, one of the laws of existence within industrial civilization". The fi rst process that man can use to produce more with less effort is the use of natural sources of energy; and it is true in a sense that no precise limit can be placed on the benefi ts of this process, because we do not know what new energies we will one day be able to use; but this does not mean that there can be indefi nite prospects of progress in this direction, nor that progress is generally assured. For nature does not give us this energy, in whatever form it may be, be it animal power, coal or oil; it must be taken from it and transformed by our work to adapt it to our own ends. But this work does not necessarily become less and less as time goes by; at present, it is even the opposite which is happening to us, since the extraction of coal and oil is becoming constantly and automatically less fruitful and more expensive. What is more, the currently known deposits are destined to be exhausted after a relatively short time. New deposits may be found; but (...) in any case the quantity will not be unlimited. New sources of energy can also, and probably one day will have to be found, but there is no guarantee that their use will be less labour-intensive than the use of coal or heavy oils; the opposite is also possible" [1].
She goes on to point out that "to hope that the development of science will lead ... to the discovery of a source of energy that can be used almost immediately for all human needs is to dream" [1].
In his remarks, some Beckian accents are found, showing the inverse character of "progress". "The expansion of trade, which once played a formidable role as a factor of economic progress, is also beginning to cost more than it avoids, because goods remain unproductive for a long time, because the number of people involved in trade is also increasing at an accelerated rate, and because transport consumes ever more energy due to innovations designed to increase speed, innovations that are necessarily more and more costly and less and less effi cient as they follow one another. Thus, in all these respects, progress is today, in a strictly mathematical way, turning into regression" [1]. Weil questions: "we have no way of clearly realizing, however, whether we are near or far from the limit at which technical progress must be transformed into a factor of economic regression" [1].
Here is the analysis Weil reaches in his search for the "abolition of social oppression" [1]: "human action continues, on the whole, to be nothing more than pure obedience to the brutal sting of immediate necessity; only, instead of being harassed by nature, man is now harassed by man" [1]. ); to conclude that "inequality could easily be softened by the resistance of the weak and the spirit of justice of the strong; it would not give rise to a need even more brutal than that of natural needs themselves, if another factor did not intervene, namely, the struggle for power" [1].

Re-rooting
How can we get out of this struggle for power and excess, to return to a relationship rooted in cosmic and ecological forces and temporalities? Isn't it a question of man trying to blend in with their necessities, rather than trying to free himself from them? But how and under what conditions? Numerous works show that "the nature of human nature", according to Rifkin [7], is not constitutive of domination or destructive tendencies, but of a movement of universal empathy, however thwarted by a progressive rise in entropy, which, according to Weil, reminds us of the order of necessities. Unless it is a question of re-questioning the "nature of nature" itself? This is what Chapelle & Servigne (2017) [8] proposes, following the work of Propotkine (1906/2001) by dethroning the notion of competition, to establish another "law of the jungle" based on mutual aid. To go further in this direction, should we join the movement of convivialism? This movement, spurred on by the work of Ivan Illich [9], "directly confronts the crucial question of our time, which is that of the means to fi ght against excess, the hubris: how can humanity learn to limit itself" [10] This is in line with the analyses we have reached with Weil, who also denounces excess.
The other question posed in more ecological terms is how to move from an anthropocene to a symbiocene, as Glenn Albrecht [11] calls for. How can we imagine human work and agriculture based on sustainable development, whose purpose would not be oriented towards the immoderation of an ever more, faster, in a time then exacerbated by acceleration (Rosa, 2014), but towards rootedness?
Permaculture, drawing inspiration from natural ecosystems, based on «favourable interactions between the components of the sites whose development it designs: humans and their needs, the territory and its characteristics, annual and perennial plants (...), animals, soils, microclimates, water, etc.» [12], and by promoting timely interactions between different plants, components of ecological environments [13], can it be a possible example?
In this respect, the questioning carried out on the basis of an analysis of the activity of permacultivators, in order to understand their resource system, makes it necessary to rethink it beyond an industrial framework and helps to broaden this point of view, by going beyond the functional dimensions for the subject's value systems that guide the mobilisation of resources, including on a more ecological side [14].
We propose to compare a evolution of the approach of system of instruments of operators.

Case study 1
In a fi rst work [15], we made the analysis of the system of instruments in the industrie of preventionists.
But, what is a system of instruments.
Characteristics of the systems of instruments https://www.peertechz.com/journals/global-journal-of-ecology Citation: Grégory  Bourmaud has highlighted the main characteristics of systems of instruments in examining previous research, using the following concept [16][17][18][19][20][21]: the different components are heterogeneous, the functions are complementary and redundant, a specifi c instrument is the "pivot" of the system, and these systems are robust and adaptable [22][23][24][25].
The heterogeneousness of instruments of the system:

Methodology of the case study
Collected data: A study of the "redefi ned task The aim of this case study is to consider any characteristics of the systems of instruments. We have adopted a qualitative case study approach [26]. The data examined here was obtained during a series of three interviews with nine preventionists, each working in an industrial environment. The subjects were considered to be experts, since they could have also been either trainers or tutors for learners in vocational training centers.
We also carried out daily work observations and participated in safety clubs.
In order to identify the systems of instruments developed by preventionists, we must try to understand their «redefi ned task» [27]. The task defi ned from the point of view of the subject comprised the operator's representations of his or her work, the way it is realized, his or her personal values, etc. The redefi ned task differs from the prescribed task in that the task is defi ned from an organizational point of view, including the task defi ned by the individual who realizes it and the task that is actually accomplished. Our process of data collection on the basis of interviews was organized in three phases: the subjects' defi nition of the work situations, the validation of these defi nitions and the confrontation with their various points of view. In the fi rst interview phase, the subjects were asked to explain what they consider to be a diffi cult situation in their daily work. The transcribed interviews were divided into themes and sub-themes and validated during a second interview. The themes pertained to the theoretical contents of safety; the sub-themes were related to episodes corresponding to real work experience. At this moment, we provided the subject with an initial proposed categorization. The aim of this second phase was to specify or further explicate the different points of their discourse. In the third phase, we organized a confrontation with other operators: other preventionists were asked to comment on an anonymous, transcribed interview. The transcription therefore became a document used for interviewing a group of operators.
The data mobilized in this chapter concerns the fi rst two phases of our interview process with an operator who is also trainer in a vocational training centre in the industrial fi eld. In the same vein as the work of Creswell [27], we chose to present this in-depth portrait because this particular professional explicitly develops his activity during a long, three-hour interview, completed with another, lasting one hour. We will focus here on the theme concerning the tools used.

The subject's characteristics
After obtaining a high school diploma and achieving a two-year university degree in science, followed by a two-year technical degree in chemistry, this operator (we will call him Subject A) became an engineer at the Ecole Polytechnique at the University of Grenoble. He specialized in the fi eld of hygiene, safety and the environment. During his career, he handled fi re management and the implementation of a safety management system in a company manufacturing industrial ink-jet printers. In another job, he dealt with machine conformity as a preventionist. His studies in ergonomics supplied him with a constant concern for the human being at work, which moreover, is highly visible in his comments.

Data analysis: Components of the system of instruments and functional analysis
The data analysis here consists of two general phases: after having determined the components of the operator's instrument system, we carried out a functional analysis. To highlight the components, we illustrated their specifi cities with extracts from the interviews with the professional. For system l, we considered all artifacts mobilized by the professional and, for each one, we determined the functions and goals fulfi lled.
Citation: Grégory  However, to go further, it would be necessary to pursue this analysis. The MFSR [24] seems to be a good means to develop the operators' contributions to the resilience of sociotechnical systems. The use of MSFR could allow us to more systematically identify the functions and the reliability of the operators' system of instruments for a class of work situations. Then, by allowing the analysis of the fragility and the robustness of the operators' systems of instruments, MFSR could be considered a relevant tool to investigate the operators' contribution to the reliability of a work system. More generally, it would be useful to foster resilience in at-risk industrial systems. MFSR presents similarities with certain reliability methods, such as the FME, in terms of structure and implementation in particular [23,24].
The resulting analysis would then not only be technical, as with FMEA, but focused on "anthropological" dimensions.

Case study 2
Resource systems of permacuter farmer and analysis method We use Rabardel's [28] instrumental approach, and mainly take into account the subjects' resource systems [23]. This system of resources is analyzed in particular in the light of the MFSR.

Methodology
We have initiated a triangulation of methods, aimed at understanding permaculture practices. This triangulation of methods consisted in taking into account :

Resource system
We had specifi cally allowed us to specify several characteristics of resource systems [23,24], some of which we retain below: 1) The heterogeneity of the resources participating in the system: institutional artefacts coexist with informal artefacts, and various internal and external resources (personal memory, collective memory, time, etc.) ; 2) The emergence of the complementarity and redundancy Based on an initial analysis of the activity of two permacultivators, we will discuss their permaculture practice from a systemic perspective (Bourmaud, 2018).

A systemic practice
The cultivation area of one of the permacultivators met is confi gured in beds, in which he grows vegetables, delimited by alleys, themselves covered with organic matter. The ten or so beds present various associations of plants, which constitute

Some main results
The analysis of the cultivation beds made up by the permacultivators thus covers :

Conclusion: The productive by the measure of the constructive
In search of a spirituality through work, can Simone Weil's work, "Antigone des temps modernes" [29], of which we have outlined some features through three of her works, prove to be inspiring in inducing a prompt refl ection to infl ect a new agricultural orientation in search of more authentic values?
The so-called progress that has become a globalized threat cannot fail to be questioned. This calls for a new approach to respond to the notion of "sustainable development". There is an urgent need for education for sustainable development, as evidenced by symposiums on this subject, such as the one entitled "Education for sustainable development and biodiversity: concepts, live questions, tools and practices" [30].
In this regard, Fleury and Fabre [31] examine paradigm shifts from a historical and problematic [32] perspective of the notion of sustainable development. "With the acceleration of the globalization process, with the problems associated with global warming, we have taken the measure of global interdependence. It follows from this the need to seek relevant paradigms for thinking about the complexity of our world.
We have thus moved from a mechanistic paradigm (clock model) to a thermodynamic paradigm (steam engine model) and then to the paradigm of "creative destruction" (chaos theory: singularity of microevents, critical points, risks and uncertainties)" [31]. In order to move beyond an informative perspective, of knowledge dissemination according to an applicationist logic, where actors must "implement, validate or improve a predefi ned model", or follow "methodological guides to "good practices" and move "from a pedagogy of inculcation to a pedagogy of judgement formation", the authors problematize a crucial question: "can we train in sustainable development as we trained in the productivist model? " [31].
We propose an analysis in terms of professional didactics [33], which focuses on the development and emancipation [34] of workers from the analysis of their conceptualizations (Vergnaud, 2007), aiming at constructive ergonomics [35], to propose to infl ect the productive under the seal of the constructive. The dialectic between constructive activity and productive activity [33] examines how the subject, starting from his constructive activity, becomes a capable subject, and manages to increase his power to act [16], since "through work, man transforms reality, but he also transforms himself" [33]. According to Rabardel [16], "productive activities are thus inscribed in the temporal horizons (from the very short to the medium term) of this or that action or set of actions, corresponding to a mission (given, prescribed or expected of the worker) or a project of the subject; whereas constructive activities are inscribed in the temporal horizons characteristic of the development of the subject and his resources (medium and long term)". Even if, according to Pastré [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]: "there is no productive without constructive activity, and vice versa", should we not also ask the question whether there is not sometimes destructive activity in the productive, which in the long term can obstruct life on Earth?
Our idea is to deploy this individual idea in order to take it back to the level of a civilization, which would then put the productive behind the constructive by thinking of its activity in the long term, in particular to preserve the living and the planetary biotope. To go further, should we not be able to propose a "rooted pedagogy", which therefore remains to be invented? Weil announces that: "the unfortunate populations of the European continent need greatness even more than bread, and there are only two kinds of greatness, the authentic greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old lie of conquering the world. Conquest is the ersatz of greatness.
The contemporary form of authentic greatness is a civilization constituted by the spirituality of work" (1949, p. 70), inasmuch as it "would be the highest degree of man's rooting in the universe, as a result of the opposite of the state we are in, which consists in an almost total uprooting" (1949, p. 128).
Is it to be hoped that an ecological spirituality will come into being in our post-modern societies!.