In a short book published in spring 2026 in Gallimard’s “Tracts” series, the philosopher Baptiste Morizot and the legal scholar Laurent Neyret propose making habitability the cardinal value of this century’s law. I share their aim, but I resist the form of their proposal. Freedom and dignity are attributes of persons, whereas habitability is a relationship between an environment and those who inhabit it, and a relationship does not enter the law the way an attribute does. I propose placing habitability at the end of the road rather than at the foundation, because all we can do is inhabit, take care of a place and keep finding new ways to organise disagreement there, and habitability results from that.
A “Tract” by a philosopher and a legal scholar
Baptiste Morizot teaches philosophy at Aix-Marseille University and works on the relations between humans and the living world; I read his Manières d’être vivant (Actes Sud, 2020; English translation Ways of Being Alive, Polity, 2022) with admiration. Laurent Neyret is a law professor at Sciences Po, having headed Laurent Fabius’s private office at the Constitutional Council from 2018 to 2025. Their book, Liberté, dignité, habitabilité. Donner au siècle la valeur qui lui manque (Freedom, dignity, habitability: giving the century the value it lacks; Gallimard, “Tracts” series, April 2026), runs to sixty-four pages, and its authors received the Olivier-Debouzy prize for it, awarded to original legal work. Their thesis is that the law protects what it names, and that it has never named the primary condition of everything it protects. To make their case, they take the reader through a series of centuries, in each of which an evil was named so that a value could be set against it: arbitrary power and freedom in the eighteenth century, privilege and equality in the nineteenth, the inhuman and dignity in the twentieth, and for our own the destruction of the living fabric that makes the Earth habitable, against which habitability should be set. Quoted in Le Monde in September 2026, Laurent Neyret says that habitability is “the condition of all our rights and freedoms”; without it, people can no longer come and go during heat waves, nor run a business without seeing their crops burn. The two authors compare their proposal to what happened at Nuremberg, when the law was raised to the level of the crimes it had to judge, and ask that the same step be taken again in the face of a destruction of the living world that continues under perfectly valid operating permits.
I read this book when it came out and was left with a sense of unease I could not put into words. I agreed with what it names, forests razed and rivers drained quite legally, and I disagreed with the way it was being said to me, as a self-evident truth to which one had only to subscribe, with no room for anyone who had not yet got there. It took me time, and discussions with Christelle Blouët and Anne Aubry, of Réseau Culture 21, who defend this text with conviction, to understand that my discomfort concerned two distinct things: the kind of value habitability is, and the order in which it is placed. An article by Claire Legros in Le Monde of 22 September 2026, which brings together the controversies that arose in France during the summer of 2026, after heat waves of unprecedented violence, between the geographers Nathalie Blanc, Daniel Béhar, Aurélien Delpirou and Guillaume Faburel and the philosopher Cynthia Fleury, helped me untangle them.
A right with no holder
Freedom, equality and dignity are attributes of persons. Every person is free, every person is the equal of the others, every person has dignity, and each can therefore invoke them before a court, against the State or against someone else. Habitability is of a different nature: it concerns an environment, or more precisely the relationship between an environment and those who live in it. Nathalie Blanc, research director at the CNRS and director of the Centre des politiques de la Terre (Centre for Earth Politics), says in the Le Monde article that habitability goes beyond the physical thresholds of temperature and access to water and refers to the possibility of leading a dignified life, which varies with age, gender and health, and above all with social standing. Daniel Béhar and Aurélien Delpirou go further, refusing to see it as a natural quality of places; for them, it is built collectively, in context, in a fragile and conflictual way. A relationship has no holder. When it is raised to the rank of a cardinal value, someone has to decide who will be able to claim it, and there are only two possible answers: either the environment itself, as New Zealand did in 2017 when it granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River, or persons, in the form of a right to live in a habitable environment.
Yet this second right already exists. It is set out in the first two articles of the 2004 Charter for the Environment, attached to the French Constitution by the constitutional act of 1 March 2005:
- Article 1: “Each person has the right to live in a balanced environment which shows due respect for health.”
- Article 2: “Each person has a duty to participate in preserving and enhancing the environment.”
The Senate report stresses that the framers of the constitutional reform did not intend to make nature a subject of law: Article 1 of the Charter grants everyone the right to live in a balanced environment that respects health, while Article 2 imposes on every person the duty to contribute to its protection and improvement. The right is thus read together with its corollary, the duty. As early as 1972, the States gathered in Stockholm by the United Nations declared that everyone has the right to an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity, and on 28 July 2022 the United Nations General Assembly recognised, by one hundred and sixty-one votes with none against, the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. Laurent Neyret knows these texts better than I do; his argument is that environmental law, vast as it is, has hit a ceiling because the value on which it rests has never been named. What is new in the book, then, is a name, a series of centuries and a rank, that is to say a choice of words and a way of teaching, and that is what makes it so readable and so convincing. Naming things matters, I am convinced of it; Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz argue that a political class forms around the conditions of habitability it defends, and I drew a practical path from this in the article Landing together. But naming is not enough to found anything, and the question of the holder remains open once the name has been given. A value with no holder takes the form of duties, and the duty written into the Charter is the duty to participate.
For Olivier Hamant, sufficiency comes last
The biologist Olivier Hamant makes a shift with regard to sufficiency (sobriété) that helped me understand my discomfort. In Antidote au culte de la performance (Antidote to the cult of performance; Gallimard, 2023), he observes that sufficiency set as a precondition, as an injunction, does little to mobilise people and gives rise to rebound effects, the electric SUV, palm oil, whereas by giving primacy to robustness, built against performance, sufficiency becomes an outcome, or in his words, it moves “from an input constraint that mobilises few people to a reliable output”. He does the same with shared health, whose economic model becomes a consequence rather than a precondition. In Robustness, antifragility, resilience I traced the history of robustness and of the two words that compete with it, and I noted then that Bruno Latour says very little about resilience and prefers to ask how to make our territories habitable. His question contains a verb, to make.
Georges Canguilhem led me to the same place by way of medicine. In The care of the milieu, I took up his thesis that health is not a state one possesses but a capacity, that of tolerating deviations from the norm and instituting new norms in new situations. No one can manufacture health; we can eat, sleep, move, look after our relationships, take care of the air and the water, and health results from this, never secured once and for all. Habitability seems to me to be of the same nature: we cannot make it, we can inhabit, in the sense of a verb, and it results from this, provisionally. The sociologist Eric Klinenberg proves the point by example in Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002). In two Chicago neighbourhoods with comparable social characteristics, residents died in very different proportions during the 1995 heat wave, and the gap came down to libraries, parks, associations, neighbours who knew one another and checked on one another. No one there had declared a value; people lived there, and their neighbourhood remained habitable through the ties they maintained.
The anthropologist Tim Ingold calls this way of seeing the dwelling perspective, in The Perception of the Environment (Routledge, 2000). He contrasts it with the building perspective, in which the world would first be designed, then constructed, then occupied, and he takes up an idea from Martin Heidegger’s 1951 lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking”: we do not build first in order to dwell afterwards, we build because we are already dwellers. The forms of the habitable world arise from the activities of those who inhabit it. Baptiste Morizot and Laurent Neyret reverse this order. They set habitability as the primary condition, upstream of everything, and ask that it be enshrined before anyone acts. Christelle Blouët and Anne Aubry see in this a considerable power to act, since ecology would cease to be one opinion among others, and this is the strongest argument in the book’s favour. And yet I feel the opposite, because a condition placed at the foundation is something we no longer have any hold on. I therefore propose the concept of inhabiting before habitability: everything we can do is a verb (to inhabit), the noun (habitability) comes afterwards, it is a result. The doing has to be put back into play every summer, to return to the example of heat waves.
The States gathered at the United Nations General Assembly in 2022 in fact wrote this in their own way, recognising that the exercise of human rights, including the right to seek information and to participate effectively in public affairs, is vital to the protection of a healthy environment. The order there is indeed this one: participation first, the environment second. I saw this up close in the animated film workshops on the imagination of disasters that I designed with Serge Tisseron and describe in Building Co-Resilience. No one there starts from a value. The participants start from the nearby forest, the river that floods, the factory next door, and one participant had included in her film about forest fires gestures of mutual aid that appear in no official prevention text. She told the story of her neighbourhood’s habitability through her own gestures and elaborations, which are hers alone.
The missing link: cultural rights
The book makes no mention of cultural rights; Anne Aubry and Christelle Blouët were the first to point out this silence to me, and it was through it that I found the key. In 2001, in the first article of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, we read a comparison that seems to me decisive here:
“As a source of exchange, innovation and creativity, cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature.”
UNESCO, “Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity”, 2001.
The drafters of the Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights, in 2007, foremost among them the philosopher Patrice Meyer-Bisch, with the participation of the legal scholar Mylène Bidault, within the Observatory of Diversity and Cultural Rights at the University of Fribourg, drew rights from it: to choose one’s cultural identity and have it respected, to have access to the resources that nourish it, to participate in cultural life and to take part in the decisions that concern it. I am deeply involved in the question of cultural rights, and I work with Réseau Culture 21, which supports local authorities and professionals in translating these rights into their public policies.
Patrice Meyer-Bisch locates the gap in the foundations, to use Baptiste Morizot and Laurent Neyret’s terms, in a different place from them: in the disregard for the diversity of knowledge through which each person, alone and with others, can know their environment, protect it and take care of it. I make this reading my own, and it seems to me that a consequence must be drawn from it which the book’s authors do not draw. The Inuit communities of the Arctic studied by the geographer James Ford adjust their hunting calendar to a close reading of weakened sea ice; the residents of the Chicago neighbourhood watched over one another through neighbourly ties woven long before the heat wave; the participant from Bordeaux knew gestures of mutual aid absent from prevention texts. These forms of knowledge are ways of inhabiting, and it is these that cultural rights protect, when they recognise each person’s capacity to cultivate what gives meaning to their existence and to take part in decisions about their environment. If cultural rights are the missing link, then habitability cannot be the foundation. The exercise of these rights produces it, and the cardinal value is only the name given to that result.
That is also why the debate that opened in France during the heat waves of summer 2026, about where people should go to live, seemed to me badly framed on both sides. Guillaume Faburel proposes, in Où habiter ? (Where to live?; Tana, 2026), seven refuge territories in sparsely populated rural regions, chosen according to access to resources, to land and to care work; Nathalie Blanc replies that the services on which the countryside depends are concentrated in cities, and Daniel Béhar and Aurélien Delpirou speak of geo-solutionism, the temptation to believe that a good map could solve problems that are far more complex and interdependent. Nothing in this debate is settled by a value at the top of the law, because no way of inhabiting can be deduced from it. It is people who decide, through their ways of inhabiting, and these ways are diverse, situated and conflictual, which is what I described as the very work of co-resilience in The three ecologies of co-resilience.
Dignity was not decreed
There remains the strongest objection that can be made to me, and I do not dismiss it lightly: dignity is no longer up for debate; one can debate how to put it into practice but not its principle, and the same would go for habitability once enshrined at the same rank. Baptiste Morizot and Laurent Neyret themselves invoke Nuremberg, and that is where I find my answer. Dignity did not become indisputable because philosophers decreed it. It became so after the camps, through trials, through the Universal Declaration of 1948, through the German Basic Law of 1949, whose first article declares it inviolable, then through decades of struggle by those to whom it was still denied. Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that the stateless people of the 1930s had lost, before any other right, the right to have rights, because no political community guaranteed them any longer; rights hold only through people organised to make them hold. Dignity came at the end of a history, and it was violated again after being enshrined at the top of the law. At Nuremberg, which the two authors take as their model, the order was the one I am defending: the catastrophe first, then the trials, and the recognition of dignity only afterwards.
Making a value indisputable also has an effect, even when its aims are right: it removes the place of anyone who has not yet got there. I experienced this reading the book, and I would put it to its authors this way: I agree with where you are going, but respect my path, hold my hand. Not everyone has travelled the same road as you towards the conviction that we depend on the living world, and those who are on their way get there through their street, their river, their trade; when a value is presented to them as already settled, they are left outside, excluded, stigmatised, made to feel guilty; they can even become scapegoats. Thierry Ribault has shown, in Fukushima, how a resilience imposed from above, to which populations must adapt, becomes a technology of consent; I answered this criticism with a co-resilience in which disagreement is organised rather than suspended, drawing on Chantal Mouffe, in The three ecologies of co-resilience. The same risk hangs over a declared habitability. By presenting it as indisputable, its authors make their value uninhabitable, if I may put it that way, for anyone who does not yet agree.
That is how I read the sentence by Cynthia Fleury that Claire Legros chose to close her article: “Not only must we find other energy models, we must also reconfigure our desires.” In Ci-gît l’amer (Gallimard, 2020; English translation Here Lies Bitterness, Polity, 2022), she describes resentment as a form of self-poisoning and writes that “from resentment to conspiratorial delusion is only a short step”, before adding that it would take a whole book to deal with this point and that she will refrain from doing so. She also writes, in the same book, that “the work of deconstruction must always begin at home”. I fully agree, and I find that she does not apply it to herself! I take this sentence seriously and turn it back on those who, like her, speak in the name of care. When disagreement is placed on the side of pathology, it is no longer listened to; it is stigmatised as a danger because it does not match the thinking held to be right, and society is then divided between those who think “rightly” and those who think “wrongly”, with the clear conscience of those who hold power. This ranking is not law. The function of law is to make room for the diversity of convictions, whereas here duties are postulated that are written nowhere, grounded in a psychological and political reading of the world, what Michel Foucault described as biopower in The Will to Knowledge (1976, the first volume of The History of Sexuality), a power exercised, in the name of health, over ways of living and thinking. Cynthia Fleury speaks from a situated position of which she seems unaware, that of the people who govern at the time she is writing. In What fear did to us and in The care of the milieu I described where this leads when a crisis comes: everyone is summoned to believe the doxa of those in power, those who doubt are stigmatised, and the ties and the trust that hold despite the diversity of opinions, which are the most precious assets a population has in a crisis, as Rebecca Solnit and Eric Klinenberg show, are undone by the powerful, who then profit from divide and rule, arguing that it is more “efficient” for managing a crisis. Whereas a person who feels bitterness, if we listen to them, if we give what they are going through the consideration that cultural rights grant it, is not a pathology to be treated, and their anger can often become the beginning of a constructive power to act if it is confronted with the ideas of others in a democratic process, which is precisely the function of law. An imposed value, even the value of care, does not protect; it divides and weakens, polarises and seeks to dominate. Whereas the room made for anyone who disagrees creates the conditions for habitability.
Approaching the law through Article 2
The law has its full place, provided it is approached through Article 2 of the Charter for the Environment, “Each person has a duty to participate in preserving and enhancing the environment”, rather than through Article 1: through the duty to participate rather than through the rank of the value. To this end I propose four methods that anyone can put into practice where they live:
- Write down who takes part before invoking the value. In any local project, before claiming habitability, name the people who take part, the knowledge they bring and the way their disagreements will be heard. When these questions cannot be answered, the value is being invoked as an excuse for not practising it.
- Take stock of the infrastructures of inhabiting. In Klinenberg’s sense, libraries, parks, associations, cafés and neighbourly networks are what saved lives in Chicago. List them in a neighbourhood, defend them as one defends a dyke, and build them in calm times, through activities that are worthwhile in themselves first of all, the double-focus activities I propose in Landing together.
- Organise a place for disagreement. In every assembly where a place is discussed, provide the moment and the form in which someone can say they disagree about the causes, the priorities or how efforts are shared out, and commit to taking it into account afterwards.
- Judge a project by what it leaves behind. Do not ask whether it complies with the value, but whether the people of the place live better there once the project is complete, and which people. The answer lies with those who cannot move away when it is 40°C, and it is them we must go and ask.
