In their memo on the new ecological class, Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz argue that political ecology will only overcome its powerlessness by constituting itself as a class, conscious and proud of itself, defined by the defence of the Earth’s conditions of habitability. During the heatwave of summer 2026, this class appeared in negative, in the gap between those who can buy an air conditioner and those who sleep in housing that holds the heat. I propose here a practical way of composing it: double-focus activities, which are worthwhile in themselves first of all, and within which coresilience builds up, to be carried out in calm times rather than in times of crisis.
A class defined by habitability
Bruno Latour and the sociologist Nikolaj Schultz published a short book of intervention, seventy-six theses meant to help political ecology out of its powerlessness (On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo, Polity, 2022; Mémo sur la nouvelle classe écologique, La Découverte, 2022). In it, they shift the definition of social classes. The classes of the twentieth century were defined by their position in the relations of production; the ecological class is defined by its position in the conditions of habitability, that is, by everything that allows a place to remain livable and lives to be engendered there. The two authors also distinguish production from engendering: producing means assembling elements that are already there, whereas engendering requires continuous care so that the beings on which habitability depends, the soils, the groundwater, the forests, the people, keep being born and lasting. Their whole politics lies in the junction to be made between “the world we live in and the world we live from”. They ask this class to take on what every class takes on, the conflict with the powers that make the world uninhabitable, pride in its own values, and the ambition, borrowed from Gramsci, of exercising cultural hegemony, that is, of setting the tone for society as a whole, as the industrial bourgeoisie once managed to do. They ask, finally, for a reversal of values: discovering our dependencies, far from humiliating us, is what makes us capable of acting. This book follows on from Down to Earth (Où atterrir ?, La Découverte, 2017), in which Latour proposed the exercise of describing one’s dependencies that I presented in the article Fabriquer la corésilience.
An air conditioner or a thermal kettle
This theory was verified during the summer 2026 heatwave in France, in a way nobody wished for. The heatwaves began as early as the end of May; between mid-June and early July, Santé publique France counted nearly six thousand excess deaths, according to still provisional data. Yet this mortality and this suffering were not distributed at random. The Fondation pour le Logement, in a study published in June 2026 under the title “Quartiers chauds !” (“Hot neighbourhoods!”), establishes that 59% of the inhabitants of priority urban districts suffer from the heat inside their homes, against 43% in the rest of the country, and that one dwelling in three in France behaves in summer like a “thermal kettle”. Well-off people can buy an air conditioner, go away for a few days, or live in old buildings with thick walls, whereas poor people more often live in recent low-cost concrete architecture, which stores heat during the day and releases it at night, just when the body would need to recover. Each person’s position in the conditions of habitability, a criterion that could seem abstract in Latour and Schultz, can be read here degree by degree, night after night.
A second mechanism was confirmed in the public handling of this ordeal. During the crisis, the recommendations were addressed to individuals, drink water, close the shutters, go out in the cool hours, while the collective causes remained out of frame: the construction budgets that produced this housing, the funding of urban greening, which is known to lower the temperature of heat islands by several degrees, the insulation of schools and hospitals. The responsibilities are political, and the moment of crisis is when they are least visible, because everyone is thrown back on their own immediate survival. I devoted the article Se rafraîchir en réchauffant la rue to neighbourhood solidarities during heatwaves.
Belonging is discovered by describing
The point in the memo that holds my attention most is the mode of belonging to this class. One does not join it as one joins a party, by agreeing with a programme. One discovers that one belongs to it by describing one’s conditions of existence, for the people who depend on the same soils, the same waters, the same care networks as I do objectively belong to my class, whatever their votes and their opinions. During the heatwave, this belonging showed itself in negative, in the shared suffering of one and the same overheated building; by describing it together, we can discover it in positive, before the suffering. With coresilience, Serge Tisseron says the same thing from within psychiatry: my ability to recover from a disaster materially depends on yours, whether we love each other or not. Belonging precedes opinion, and this is a political opportunity, because it gives a starting point to people whom opinions divide. There still need to be places where this objective belonging can become perceptible and sayable. Collective description exercises, shared inquiries, mapping, storytelling workshops, are those places. In the workshops on the imaginary of disasters (Create your own film about imaginary disasters), people who did not know each other discover they worry about the same floods and are attached to the same places, and this discovery is already a composition of class, on a small scale.
Care as the language of the class
The philosopher Joan Tronto gave care a definition that seems written for coresilience (Moral Boundaries, 1993): care designates everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible, and this world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment. Tronto thus crosses from the outset the boundary between caring for people and caring for milieus, the very boundary the ecological class has to cross. Taking care of an isolated elderly person and taking care of a wetland belong to the same work of maintaining habitability, and this work, massively invisibilised and feminised, is the one Latour and Schultz make the central value of their class when they speak of engendering. Coresilience, then, is care organised on the scale of interdependencies.
During a crisis, we unlearn connection
One might believe that coresilience is learned in disasters themselves, since they give rise to spectacular solidarities. I think the opposite: a crisis is the worst moment for learning to depend on one another. During a crisis, those who govern concentrate decisions in urgency, which leaves little room for deliberation; they readily govern through fear, which is the shortest path to obedience; and in fear, we learn distrust, because being afraid is always being afraid of something, and that something quickly becomes someone. We lived through the most massive example of this during the Covid period: people were asked to perceive one another as dangerous, and in the withdrawal that followed, those for whom connection was a condition of survival, starting with isolated elderly people, found themselves deprived of what was keeping them alive. I recalled in the article Social Presence and Physiological Health how much health depends on the quality of our bonds, and I analysed this manufacturing of fear in What fear did to us. In the same movement, public attention slides from political responsibilities to individual behaviour, as we have just seen with the heatwave. Under such conditions, nobody is inclined to open up to their neighbours. The solidarities that arise in disasters are real, but they rest on what existed before. Coresilience is therefore prepared in calm times, away from the moments when fear is used to govern.
The double-focus activity
Calm times, however, have their own obstacle: outside a crisis, preparing for a crisis attracts nobody, because we keep the secret hope that the next one will not come, in other words we count on luck. The only people who come to preparedness exercises are those who are highly aware of the risks and those already inhabited by the imaginary of disaster, and it is fortunate that not everyone lives in that imaginary. If all we offer is preparation, we fail from the start. It is to get out of this dead end that I propose a concept, the double-focus activity. The image comes from bifocal glasses, which allow you to see clearly both near and far without changing spectacles. A double-focus activity has a near focus, its immediate and intrinsic value, the pleasure of creating, learning, expressing oneself, meeting others; and a distant focus, the coresilience that builds up within it without being the stated purpose of the session. Both focuses must be real: if the near focus is missing, we fall back into the civil-defence drill nobody attends, and if it is the distant focus that is missing, all that remains is a pastime. In French, moreover, the word for focus, foyer, also names the hearth, the place one inhabits, and the habitability Latour and Schultz speak of begins there.
The economist John Kay showed in Obliquity (Profile Books, 2010) that complex goals are best achieved indirectly: the most profitable companies are not those that aim at profitability, the happiest people are not those who pursue happiness. Coresilience belongs to this family of goals that we miss by aiming at them. Our filmmaking workshops on the imaginary of disasters rest on this principle. People come to make a film, for the pleasure of personal expression and collective fabrication, and it is within this very pleasure that the imaginaries and the bonds we will need are built. The psychologist Barbara Fredrickson gave this intuition an experimental foundation with her broaden-and-build theory (“What Good Are Positive Emotions?”, Review of General Psychology, 1998, then American Psychologist, 2001): when we experience positive emotions, our repertoire of thoughts and actions broadens in the moment, and durable resources remain from it, psychological resilience, social bonds, skills, which stay available in later ordeals. The pleasure of the near focus is therefore not the sugar-coating of preparation, it is its mechanism.
Nine folded pieces of advice
I will give two examples of these double-focus activities, drawn from my facilitation practice. The first is a ritual of advice that I have tried out in training sessions and that works very well. One person stands facing the group and sets out, for three to five minutes, a question they are genuinely asking themselves, about their work, a project, what they want (the effort of synthesis is part of the exercise), then asks for advice and sits back down. Each person in the group then writes a piece of advice on a scrap of paper, cuts it out with scissors, folds it in two and stands up to hand it over in person. The advice is private, written, addressed to one person only. Then someone else stands before the group, and so on; with ten people, it takes about forty-five minutes, and everyone leaves with nine folded pieces of advice. Each of us has, on someone else’s situation, a distance the other does not have, and these distances are all different, because our skills and our histories are. Giving advice costs little to the giver, the ideas come almost by themselves, and the person who offers does not measure the power of what they offer: the advice scribbled in haste may be the one that counts the most, more than another prepared with care, decorated with a drawing, given with love. This value born of variety rather than optimisation, I relate to the robustness of the living described by the biologist Olivier Hamant, which I presented in the article Robustesse, résilience, antifragilité: living systems hold together through their redundancies and heterogeneities, not through the performance of each element.
The second example is the Participatory reverse photography workshop, in which each person takes a photograph and then keeps silent while the others comment on their image. I developed in the article What the gaze of others does to our images this discovery that the gaze of others builds us: others see in our images things we did not know we had put there, and what they tell us about them teaches us about ourselves. These two exercises call for the same gesture, daring to present oneself to others in one’s lived, sensitive reality rather than in a role, a gesture whose conditions I explored in Giving Ourselves Permission to Create. And this gesture is the one the composition of the ecological class calls for: in these sessions, people whom opinions divide train themselves, on objects of no apparent gravity, to depend on one another’s gaze and skills. This is interdependence experienced, before being interdependence thought.
A held hand facing a threat
These experiences imprint themselves on the organism, well beyond memory. The neuroscientist James Coan showed, in an experiment that has become a classic (“Lending a Hand”, Psychological Science, 2006, with Hillary Schaefer and Richard Davidson), that holding the hand of someone close measurably reduces the activity of the brain’s threat circuits in the face of an announced danger, all the more so when the relationship is a good one. From this he drew a theory, known as social baseline theory, according to which the human brain takes the proximity of others as its reference state: alone, everything costs more, in vigilance as in energy. As for the resources described by Barbara Fredrickson, they persist long after the session. What this research describes, we practise in our workshops: every time a person experiences the gaze of others building them up instead of judging them, this experience settles into their body, their emotions and their memory; it is from this reserve that they will draw on the day they have to count on strangers. This is why these seemingly playful exercises are in reality extremely concrete in what they transform.
Neither sacred union nor small territory
This composition from below lends itself to two misunderstandings. The first would be to see it as a general reconciliation. A class has adversaries, and the ecological class confronts specific interests, those who profit from uninhabitability, with whom describing dependencies is not enough to reach an understanding. The second misunderstanding would be a retreat into the local. Serge Tisseron insists on the nesting of coresiliences up to the planetary scale, and Latour and Schultz give their class an ambition of cultural hegemony, not of a hamlet. Local exercises of description and creation take on their political meaning when the people who run them connect, tell one another what they are doing, federate into networks that cross borders the way heatwaves cross them. Composing the ecological class from below therefore exempts us neither from conflict nor from the large scales; it gives conflict a sensitive base, and the large scales members who know why they belong.
