| Summary: | This article proposes to establish some basic elements of reflection with which to build a political geography of the environment. Since its establishment as a national school, French geography never really succeeded in taking into consideration the fundamentally politicalenvironmental question, or to consider it as an ontologically integral part of its field of action. This remains true despite contemporary environmental stakes. Firstly, because French geographers have had a tendency to reluctantly abandon the idea that, in contradistinction to other disciplines, such as ecology, they maintain a certain objective distance from their object of study. Then, because the discipline did not succeed in capitalizing on its own knowledge about the environment, whilst other disciplines, such as biology, found renewed visibility by this means. Even when French geographers have been interested in the question, they all too often left out critical reflection on nature policies or on the heuristic tensions between nature/culture, remaining within a perspective in line with the historical corpus of the discipline. However, we argue that post-determinism and globalisation impose an in-depth revision of the epistemological groundings of the discipline. Biodiversity conservation, as an experimental zone between new paradigms and the emergence of a new space of cosmopolitic action clearly illustrates this necessity. Because, for a long time, conservation re-inscribed the oppositions between ecology and geography, in their respective manners of managing space and in their relations to the political, geographers have barely studied this domain of activity. Conservation is however historically trans-sected by entirely geographical phenomena. Inscribed within development policies, conservation became transnational and local at the same time. In its shifting from a natural enclave to the political arena, conservation can also be thought of as a place of experimentation of new ways of inhabiting the world, that are both post-natural and post-national. Concurrently, processes of globalization and questions of global change have imposed a new conceptual field made of disjunctions, hybridization, interdependences and interrelationships. We can argue that a new field of experiences and of global and individual responsibilities has opened. Engaging with these new spaces of action, requires us to adopt an epistemological shift that takes us beyond the nation state and the nature/culture dichotomy. This shift might be thought of as one that gives rise to a new political geography of the environment, a cosmopolitic geography.
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