1 Environmental history generally refers to the idea of an “environmental shift” that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in a spark of public awareness. Yet, as Michel Letté suggests, that shift was perhaps not quite so abrupt. A study of industrial excesses and their conflicts, viewed in terms of their industrial and political contexts, the relationships between the stakeholders, their protest resources, definitions of risk, and the relationships between nature and culture, indicate that it was a much longer process that evolved over time. As the 1960s and 1970s marked only one period of such change, their importance should be reevaluated.

2 On April 20, 2010, an offshore oil rig exploded off the coast of New Orleans; it sank two days later. Hundreds of thousands of liters of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico every day for several months. This accident, which had unprecedented consequences, undoubtedly reinforced the feeling that industrial excess had now gone too far. It also intensified the pressure that public opinion was putting on the government to control such excesses.

3 But is complete control even possible? The 2011 Fukushima catastrophe showed that even when mandatory fail-safe measures are put in place, people remain exposed to the risk of a global disaster. The culmination of a string of major incidents, including Chernobyl in 1986, Fukushima generated strong interest in the history of nuclear expansion.

4 However, an accident does not have to occur for conflict and history to suddenly come to the forefront. The routine operation of offshore rigs and the purging of oil tankers, for instance, have produced more pollution than the oil spills of the 1960s and 1970s, leading to constant protests and the regulation of international maritime transport. Similarly, the impact of nuclear plants extends far beyond their geographical boundaries, thus making the definition and negotiation of their waste, treatment, and permissible levels of contamination a necessity. Routine dumping into waterways, chronic pollution and dispersion of toxic substances, the fear of epidemics, soil contamination, the infliction of unsanctioned risk, and countless other excesses are part of an industrial history that is largely composed of protests against these very excesses. In other words, past excesses and conflicts have significantly contributed to the emergence of the contemporary demand for control. This demand is thus not solely related to the most recent catastrophes, even if the prevailing sentiment is that the excesses only became unacceptable with the twentieth-century environmental shift of industrial society and the invention of the concept of the environment.

5 Long before industrialization, conflicts over production sites illustrate that excess is actually inherent to many human activities. Whether routine or accidental, excesses were already the subject of complaints from neighboring populations in the eighteenth century. However, authorities’ concerns over these excesses were two-fold. They were motivated as much by an obsession with public order as by health concerns. Another imperative developed in the nineteenth century: controlling protestors to keep them from compromising industrial development. [1] The government therefore adopted appropriate industrialist legislation in 1810. [2] However, it was through mandatory conflict management that the government turned the protection of residents and workers into a political agenda. [3] The environmental demands of the twentieth century, along with the increasing involvement of residents, have profoundly transformed the framework of public intervention.

6 To what extent have excesses and their conflicts contributed to these developments? What impact did they have on the environmental shift of industrial society? Today, these questions resonate among those involved in environmental management. They have reopened interest in the history of conflicts connected to polluting and dangerous activities. As a result, important works have been dedicated to the topic. [4] Their premise is that a history of conflicts is as essential as that of the government intervention that follows them. The latter generally involves the control and management of the behaviors of economic and social actors. An alternative perspective would be to examine what led to the emergence of “the environment” as a political category of thought and action in the twentieth century. [5] Indeed, environment and conflict are integral components of each other.

7 By presenting a history of the excesses themselves and the conflicts they engendered, the environment no longer appears to be merely the emergence of a collective conscience, but rather the convergence of paradoxes to be overcome. In fact, the environmental shift of industrial society coincides with that particular moment when the most visible impacts of industrial activity fade or disappear. In France, an increasing number of large, polluting factories are relocating. Others are becoming “clean” or are adopting undisputed technical advances to reduce their external impact. The remediation and rezoning of former industrial sites is bringing a bit of green to sustainable neighborhoods. Yet industry remains stigmatized. Its excesses are no longer tolerated. It needs to be controlled. But this only seems to be a contradiction, however. By stepping back and adopting a long-term perspective of the environmental shift of industrial society, current conflicts become, on the contrary, a manifestation of excesses that have accumulated over more than two centuries of industrialization. Their history—which is informed by the history of disasters and pollution—contains the seeds of the twentieth-century environmental shift of industrial society and the invention of the concept of the environment.

What Exactly Does “Excess” Mean?

8 The interest here is one of the reasons for environmental conflict: industrial excess. Yet why adopt this notion of “excess” as opposed to “pollution” or “nuisance”? First of all, seeking to identify excesses places the focus on the system in which they originate. It is from this system that the source of protest stems. This proposition makes it possible to coordinate three key levels of analysis: territory, history, and the inevitably hybrid and multi-faceted nature of the realities in which conflict is rooted.

9 Secondly, the wide range and ambiguity of the phenomena covered by the notion of excess refers to a history not only of tangible facts and consequences, but, more importantly, of the processes by which these consequences enter the political and social arenas. In other words, by clearly identifying excesses, we can reconstruct the manifestations, classifications, and other behaviors that create a reality that—more than just a production system— constitutes a ground for conflict. In this approach, the starting point is the protests that have turned the implementation of a production system and its implications into an “excess.” The environment can thus be seen as the theater of negotiations between the concerned or impacted actors who are attempting to maintain or eliminate the offending excesses.

10 Lastly, the word “excess” harbors its own problematic. “Excess” implies illegitimacy, and is perceived as something needing to be contained, controlled, supervised, or even stopped in order to forestall disaster. Its status will always be ambiguous. Excess is not necessarily a corporeal object, and may also be intangible. It may therefore be counted as anything that creates or perpetuates conflict between a system and its environment. This includes sensory physical excesses, including smells, smoke, noise, vibrations, dust, morally or otherwise unacceptable images, and effluents. These are literally nuisance and pollution. However, it also includes potential and feared excesses, or, in other words, risks and dangers that are presumed, imagined, or proven; excesses that are invisible, unknown, or imperceptible (vectors of contamination, radiation, colorless or odorless toxic substances, etc.); excesses that have delayed effects (the cumulative effects of pollutants, as well as people’s premature reactions when, for example, a project to build a new facility is announced); and lastly economic and social excesses (disruption of public order, competition for the use of resources, the effect of a company’s presence on the behavior of property owners, an activity’s impact on local community life, etc.).

11 A history of excesses and their associated conflicts would therefore consist of defining what becomes an excess, how and why this excess was perceived and experienced as such, and why it was considered necessary to fight it, or, on the contrary, to feign ignorance or accept its consequences. Using another disaster that occurred in Hungary in 2010 as the starting point, this paper will illustrate how an environmental conflict can be reactivated in France and reassessed through the prism of excess although it began more than a century ago.

Renegotiating Territorial and Environmental Control

12 The dramatic spill of toxic sludge over several dozen square kilometers in 2010, caused by the rupture of a reservoir at the Ajka aluminum plant in Hungary, is undisputedly a prime example of industrial excess. This event, which was a major ecological and human disaster for the local community, directly resonates with a similar plant built in Gardanne, France, in 1893.

13 The Gardanne plant was built before the prefectural building permit for the chemical facilities affecting the immediate surroundings had been obtained. [6] Over the next three years, the site doubled in size. From the beginning, conflict arose between the factories and local residents, most of whom were farmers. One of the sources of conflict was the red dust that strong winds picked up from the bauxite reserves and deposited on nearby land, homes, gardens, and fields. The factory also made a lot of noise day and night. Last but not least, the unpleasant odor of calcined alumina permeated the surrounding atmosphere.

14 The permanent excess that caused the most tension, however, was the “red” sludge, the main residue of aluminum production. It takes two tons of bauxite to make one ton of aluminum, along with one ton of caustic soda, four of lignite, and a lot of water. The bauxite is crushed, ground, then mixed with a soda-enriched liquor in a pressurized autoclave at high temperature. After filtration, the bauxite residues form the red effluent that was the subject of dispute, or at least its land management was in this case.

15 When production began, these residues were deposited between the plant and the terminal, then later on the other side of the road. Containing a high amount of caustic soda, the toxic sludge was heavily pollutant. In 1902, negotiations with the Water and Forest Agency led to the waste deposit sites being excavated and moved to the hills above the neighboring town of Bouc-Bel-Air. An air carrier was taken into service in 1906 to make this possible. Sixty years later, and after numerous disputes, the polluted valleys were considered to be saturated. One of the proposed solutions for the removal of these residues was to dump them in the sea. With, on the one hand, the plant threatening to close if public authorities refused to give their approval, and strong local opposition led notably by Alain Bombard, the Ricard company, and fishery associations on the other, a pipe forty-five kilometers long, and jutting another eight kilometers into the sea, was built from Gardanne to Port-Miou. From 1967 on, part of the sludge was directed through this pipe to be released off the coast of Cassis. The rest was stored in a reservoir near the plant.

16 Like most other such cases in France, the imposition of this production system on the land, the legitimacy of the risks forced on the local population, and its repercussions in the form of pollution, provoked heated conflicts with the environment. [7] These conflicts, which never ceased on a local level, re-emerged on a national level between factory owners, public authorities, the surrounding population, and environmental groups following the Ajka catastrophe in 2010. The event revived stalled negotiations over how to classify the effluent from the plant, or, in other words, negotiations to either highlight the excesses caused by the Gardanne plant, or to make them disappear. The issue of how to classify these residues thus reappeared, including in particular the legitimacy of the company’s territory, which includes the production site and toxic substance storage areas as well as the area it takes over through its dumping onto the seabed. In this case, the environmental protest clearly addresses the allocation of functions for this territorial expansion. For some, this expansion represents the necessary assimilation of the plant’s external impacts. For others, it is the unlawful appropriation of an environment that should be preserved, or, in the least, a territory that should be shared. These fragments of disputed land thus become excesses and grounds for conflict. The challenge for the protestors is to define them as such. The system implemented by the plant and its sludge discharge have gone past acceptable limits, thus creating excess.

17 The excesses therefore appear here as a territorial variant of the original grounds for conflicts over setting-up and operations. A plant, workshop, field, or mine is never set up on inhabited land without any history. They constantly interact with their surroundings and become anchored in the local culture. All systems negotiate in a more or less explicit manner to recognize areas of authority, or spheres of influence, in order to have rights over fragments of territory that are proportional to the powers they can exert there. These excesses are thus seen as necessarily hybrid spaces where the objective foundations of the territory embody the economic, political, and social issues at stake. Through the prism of these excesses, this history of environmental conflict involves the negotiations for the still precarious cohabitation between territories that have contradictory functions. Therefore, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that they are caused by actors. [8] Among them, the protestors are paid particular attention, especially those who had little influence, or who had difficulty establishing their influence, in the traditional spaces of the city used to distinctly and unequivocally establish dominance.

Excess and Conflict before “the Environment”

18 Before the notion of the environment turned the fear of pollution and industrial risks into an obvious fact that had to be contested, most people seemed to accept its consequences. But were earlier periods characterized by a lack of an environmental conscience? Did it coincide with the general consent or desire for a rational industrialized economy, pervading the population as much as the elite and decision-makers? In short, was protest only marginal, inaudible, or legally unjustifiable due to ignorance of the impact of industry, or because it was widely believed to be inevitable?

19 Far from fully neglected by those who were transforming the industrial economy, the environment was governed, as was the population, for the needs of rational production. The history of pollution shows that its consequences were never ignored, not by the affected residents or workers, and not by the authorities. The testimonies date far back, [9] and their motives diversified over the centuries. [10] The metal industry, mining, and logging generated the most conflict. [11] In the Middle Ages, townspeople constantly complained about the slaughterhouses, tanneries, tallow production, and metal processing. Town councilors were committed to freeing the city from the mire and putrid or corrosive effluent from these workshops. [12] In the early eighteenth century, while farmers in the Lyon countryside fought mine owner François Blumenstein, a constant series of complaints in Paris tried to put a stop to industrial pollution, or at least drive it out of the city. [13] At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Leblanc soda factories, which manufactured sulfuric acid, were the source of a significant number of environmental conflicts and trials in Rouen, Lille, and Marseille. [14] The impact of these activities is still deeply engraved in the landscape today. [15] Expressions of discontent were commonly recorded during the prerequisite inquiries that were part of the factory installation authorization process; these inquiries were referred to as commodo et incommodo inquiries. In addition, there were complaints and petitions, so that residents took on the role of government assistants, reporting negligence by their industrial neighbors. [16] The dumping of materials, acid waste, noise and vibrations, risk of fire and epidemics, and an infinite number of other excesses were added to the list of older forms of pollution as industrialization intensified.

20 The time prior to twentieth century environmental movements in France was therefore not characterized by a peaceful and serene landscape void of pollution and protest. The country was experiencing an industrial boom in the very heart of its cities. There were constant confrontations between contradictory interests: industrialists, artisans, and farmers were all eager to conduct their bustling business without hindrance. Arson, threats, attacks, property damage, and ransacking may have been much more common than discreet industrial accounts may reveal, with a few cases of site disturbances and attacks beginning to appear now and again. The rocket attack on the Creys-Malville nuclear plant construction site in 1982, and the bombing of an aluminum plant in Martigny in 1985 are nevertheless highly exceptional cases. [17] In fact, such demonstrations of violence are not the rule. Civil proceedings by property owners and farmers hoping to receive compensation constitute the main visible form of conflict.

21 Apart from such cases, few studies have focused on the range of actions undertaken by protesting residents. A history of excesses and their conflicts could thus explore the spectrum of local attitudes in close proximity to the actors, and even their subordinates, to flush out the resistance strategies employed by the dominated parties. Such a history might show that they did not necessarily accept the consequences of industrial production without taking action. [18] For example, recent research about popular resistance to the mechanization of work and the methods of individual and collective action involving attacks on machinery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries invites a reassessment of the grammar of protest, starting with the actual systems of production. [19] 

Forgotten Actors among Subordinate Classes

22 Indeed, most studies of environmental conflicts focus on the period beginning in the 1970s. [20] They often present the protest as a breakdown of consensus on the benefits of industrial society. It is thus seen as the product of the debt left by industrialization. [21] In a way, the emergence of the protests coincided with the apogee of the environmental mobilization that came out of the environmental movements. [22] Just as a history of the notion of the environment for the period prior to institutionalization and its existence as a political issue would be meaningless, until recently a history of environmental conflicts would have neither purpose nor protestor. With few exceptions, the people did not organize protests, or only did so on very rare occasions. Immediate, urgent, and everyday preoccupations were too compellingly important to leave room for a resolution to take action. Moreover, nature was seen only for its utilitarian value; there was no question of considering the environment in the way it is viewed today, but rather there was a desire to rationalize the use of nature through science and technique, to be stakeholders in the industrial progress that was underway. [23] 

23 This brief observation suggests that environmental protests were a luxury reserved for the more privileged classes. They only concerned the more affluent or, in their NIMBY (not-in–my-backyard) incarnation, a mobilization of egotistical cynics concerned only about protecting their local environment at the expense of the public interest. [24] At the opposite end of the spectrum, indigenous populations, neophytes, laborers, and subordinates formed an oppressed class reputed for its lack of awareness, incompetency, and general irrationality.

24 Nothing could be further from the truth. The proof lies in the perpetuation of the fight for resources, territory, and health that some of the poorest populations have undertaken against multinational corporations who adapt their excesses to the political and social conditions that regulate the use of local resources and labor. Often described as the passive victims of their fate, the affected populations are at times active participants in their fights. Studies of environmental injustice have amply demonstrated that although the most disadvantaged populations suffer disproportionately from the excesses inflicted on them, they are neither powerless nor do they lack awareness. [25] Therefore, the environment must be seen as a specific space of negotiation for reasons other than simply for survival. [26] 

25 To conceive a history of industrial excesses and their conflicts, one must thus clarify the meaning that the actors involved assign to the object of protest. Far from being a pretext, the environment is indeed one of the underlying motives of the mobilization, provided, however, that its status and the issues at stake are redefined in terms different to those established by the habitual advocates of action, [27] as conflicts are always a manifestation of a break in the balance of power relations. In principle, there is no reason to dissociate their motivations, today or in the past, from the environmental issues at stake, regardless of whether the focus is on the indigenous populations of the colonies or on the French working class.

26 In this regard, studies of subordinates, and to a certain extent post-colonial studies, suggest that the dominated had their own autonomous sphere of political action, as did opposition movements in what are generally considered to be tribal or ethnic rivalries, or confrontations between experts and irrational neophytes. In all cases, the terms of protest are contextually and historically established. The conflicts are thus anchored in a conflictual political and social history, and are rooted in the harshness of nineteenth-century industrial history, or in a past of colonial violence. Political, social, economic, ethnic, religious, identity-related, and territorial conflicts are thus reinterpreted through the prism of environmental issues, the foundations of which lie in the use of local resources and labor, and are thus related to the local management of globalized interests.

27 Environment, excess, and conflict have been intertwined for some time. This permanency contradicts the overly idealized image of a collective conscience emerging from the industrial gloom in the twentieth century. This way of reducing the environment to a recent awareness does not actually help us understand how the past influences contemporary attitudes and behaviors. Ignoring the historic foundations of those excesses and their conflicts complicates our understanding of a few troubling paradoxes, including the paradox which sooner or later reveals the disparities between the history of knowledge and technical innovations, the history of environmental protest and collective mobilizations, and the history of public intervention or legislation. For instance, the silence of residents who were once swimming in pollution contrasts with the virulence of their protests at a time when the pollution in question seems to have (almost) disappeared. A final example will provide a more accurate idea.

Tons of Chromium and a Clod of Soil

28 In the spring of 2008, a clod of black soil on a road in Moulins-sur-Céphons roused the anger of local residents, who created an organization to protect the quality of life in the Céphons and Nahon valleys of the Indre region of France. For several days, these few cubic centimeters of mud made the local news, splashing across television screens, the radio waves, and newspaper headlines. What could have been caused this mobilization of the neighboring population? They were protesting against the environmental and health risks posed by the trucks that were hauling contaminated materials from the nearby river through their village. This mud was being transported by non-watertight trucks to a local farm landfill. This cleanup had been ordered following the accumulated excesses of a tannery, itself the successor of medieval tanneries. [28]

29 This industry had primarily developed in Levroux in the early nineteenth century. The manufacturing processes was a significant source of nuisance, but also heavily polluted the local stream, as the tanneries dumped their waste into it. The local population suffered the health-related consequences of a poisonous environment. It was so noxious, in fact, that a typhoid epidemic raged in the town for several months in 1898. The pollution, and notably the chemical pollution, worsened in the 1960s due to a new wave of industrialization and the dumping of large quantities of waste products, in particular chromium, into the rivers and streams. Hexavalent chromium is carcinogenic, and this toxic heavy metal tends to take on this form when the contaminated sludge is handled. This concentration of pollutants had caused aquatic wildlife to disappear long ago. After the 1990s, conditions had become more favorable for the cleanup and rezoning of the site, since the industry had essentially disappeared, at least in its initial form.

30 Illustrated in this way, this conflict situation, which has endured through two centuries of traditional artisanal and industrial activity, can indeed make it seem as if these two events were treated in an inexplicably disproportionate manner. A quick conclusion might even lead one to find the protestors’ behavior to be irrational, and to discredit their decision to voice their opinion in public.

31 A few readjustments must be made, however. First of all, the issue cannot be reduced to an expert’s determination of the amount of chromium pollution found in a clod of soil, or the tangible link between controversial quantities of toxic substances and how they are viewed by the accusers. The biophysical reality of the interactions between molecules and living organisms certainly must not be ignored, but it is not sufficient to fully encompass a process that is profoundly political, cultural, and social in nature. The environment in question is not an existing object that is assembled and stable for all time. It is the product of a history, of a projection of local identities, and of a renegotiation of the definition of these spaces and the functions assigned to these territories.

32 Here, the contested clod of soil is simply one of the many elements in the development of an environmental conflict surrounding a series of excesses by the old tanneries, the sedimentation of which formed the fertile ground in which the confrontation of conflicting interests could take root. An entire system unfurls around the clod of soil, involving the instruments used to measure the amount of chromium pollution and legal regulations, as well as the industry owners of today and yesteryear, local employees and residents, doctors and health experts, public authorities, property owners, the fish that disappeared from the river long ago, and so on. From now on, should we not pay serious attention to the number of actors involved and not force hidden agendas on them, but rather listen to what they have to say and observe their actions in order to understand, in light of a unique history, the way in which they are connected to a broader environmental policy?

A History of Environmental Conflict

33 On the surface, environmental conflict may thus be seen as the manifestation of tensions between social actors, the motivation for which is the confrontation between the functions attributed to a given environment. This environment is a shared space. Divergent interests negotiate how it is used. Conflict therefore arises when the functions attributed to a given environment are impeded. They are impeded because they infringe upon the integrity of individuals and population groups, living beings and ecosystems. Traditionally, these contradictory interests quarrel over the control of resources, space, and territories. They tend to undermine the values, identities, and relationships to nature that are projected onto this environment.

34 Is this way of seeing environmental conflict specific to the present day? Is it not just as relevant to the interpretation of past confrontations, thus making environmental conflict itself a tool for studying the history of those confrontations produced by changes in surroundings, the use of resources, the landscape, health, territory, and unsanctioned risk? In this case, environmental conflict cannot be conceptualized as an opposition based on a predefined and unequivocal problem, with actors whose perspectives and interests are simply in competition with one another. Rather, it must be seen as a complex and on-going negotiation to define and give meaning to the environmental problem. [29] 

35 The term “environment” must be comprehensively reevaluated to incorporate everything that appropriated spaces contain, both naturally and culturally. [30] These are human structures created as much by nature as by political and social organizations. In other words, the term “environment” refers neither to a state of nature to which an intrinsic value has been attributed, nor to a specific category of political action or thought, but rather, in a broader sense, to the entirety of these hybrid elements—elements that are part of history and form the territories whose status and classification are the subject of a renegotiation or reaffirmation through conflict at any given time. This implies having to situate its improbable definition at the very heart of the transactions which determine the boundaries between public and private areas, technical frameworks and the living world, perception and reality as experienced.

36 This approach sees the environment as an inevitably plural reality. It takes into consideration three irreducible components that can never be fully ignored, although they may be isolated for the purposes of historical research: territorial geography, which is the seat of local-global conflict; history, or rather the histories under the scope of which the terms of the conflict between past and future fall; and finally, a hybrid component, between nature and culture.

37 A history of industrial excesses and their conflicts therefore requires that special attention be paid to the spaces and competing processes of the appropriation of territories whose initial functions are impeded by that which exceeds its limits. This approach implies focusing on the negotiations aimed at attributing the label of “excess” to the real or intangible matters concerned. These are the negotiations that must be reinstated, negotiations conducted publicly, in administrative and political offices, courtrooms, in the spheres of regulation, the specific areas of public intervention, places where decisions are made, places of science and assessment, and all other spaces of controversy and legitimization.

38 Using the notion of excess as a starting point for the interpretation of past conflicts ultimately leads to establishing a connection between a history of environmental conflict and a political history of the emergence of “the environment” as a concept. This avoids the problem of allowing the actors and issues to disappear behind major disasters with national or international repercussions. The background noise created by the many local conflicts during industrialization continues to echo in cities today. The history of conflict would undoubtedly shed light on the transition from an industrial society of excesses to a society that is fed up with their consequences. The image of a turning point in environmental attitudes in industrial society, which in the past would have allowed the conflicts, can now be viewed through the prism of a long history of excesses.

Putting the Environmental Shift in Perspective

39 The trauma of industrial restructuring has indisputably transformed the relationship between the French and their industry, an economic activity they no longer appreciate. The contrast between the excitement at a triumphant industry at the beginning of the last century and its condemnation seven or eight decades later is striking. Has industrial waste ultimately led to a rejection of industry? Have the pollution-saturation of the environment, ecology, and activism for pristine nature, along with the catastrophes that resonate in our minds, encouraged this action to oppose pollution and risk? Should the explosion in Feyzin in 1966, or the sinking of the Torrey Canyon the following year, be considered the inauguration of an era of great environmental catastrophes and a consequent collective awakening in France?

40 It was undoubtedly due to major events like these that environmental issues became part of the political agenda and the subject of media coverage. The explosion of the Grenelle gunpowder factory (1794), the Courrière disaster (1906), and the destruction of the AZF factory (2001) had such an impact on social consciousness that they played a decisive role in the drafting of legislation on classified facilities. In official texts, the explosion of the Grenelle gunpowder plant prompted the advent of industrial risk management in France, although the connection is not obvious. What is obvious, however, is the need to give the current action of political authorities a genealogy, a history whose end is already known, namely an awareness of the problems and good governance practices. It encourages the search for a new rationality for a new economic and social order, establishing the frameworks for contemporary public policy. It encourages the extension of the concept of “the environment” to all aspects of human activity, and the dictates of sustainable development which now demand the creation of a responsible future, balancing market forces and utopias. Environmental thinking is assuredly anchored in a twentieth-century development in humankind’s sensitivity and relationship to nature, and in the legislation and regulation of dangerous activities; it was a century marked by accidents, large-scale pollution, and mass poisonings. In a way, the demands for a safe and healthy environment are a sign that industrial society has reached full maturity and hence the final stage of modernization.

41 This proposition must nevertheless deal with the history of excesses and their conflicts over the long term. Actors and issues must be reintroduced where they are prone to disappear in the broader thesis of an environmental shift in industrial society. The scope must be revised. Multiple levels of analysis, time, and space must be defined in order for this approach to be applied. By observing what occurs at the local level, and by stepping back from the narrative of the environmental awakening, the wide range of motivations becomes perceptible, as does the complexity of the relationship between actors and resource, territory, space, landscape, and surroundings. In particular, the focus on excesses and their territories reveals how the conflict that has now been defined within the term “environment” has come about. This history has finally begun to examine the frameworks and forms of mobilization, the nature of which evolve with laws and modes of public intervention. It highlights the dynamics of their territorialization. It encourages us to broaden our focus to envision different versions of the environmental conflict and, ultimately, to understand that there are many levels of reality when trying to unravel the sources of these conflicts.