Écologie de l'action
Edgar Morin’s concept: once an action is set in motion in the world, it no longer belongs to the one who initiated it. It enters a play of interactions and feedback with its environment, which can divert it from its path—or even turn it against its original intent. Recognizing this *ecology* means accepting that we control the beginning of an action, never its consequences.
Par « écologie de l’action » on entend que toute action, une fois engagée, entre dans un jeu d’inter-rétro-actions dans le milieu où elle se déroule, et peut non seulement dévier de sa voie, mais déclencher des forces adverses plus puissantes que celles qui l’ont initiée pour finir par revenir comme un boomerang frapper la tête de ses auteurs.
To launch an action is to entrust it to the world. As long as it remains a plan, it obeys its designer; the moment it is set in motion, it enters a web of interactions and feedback loops that no one controls. The environment takes it up, combines it with other forces, and the outcome may diverge from the intention—sometimes even reversing it. This is the meaning of the boomerang image: the effect comes back to strike the one who triggered it.
Morin derives two principles from this. First, once launched, an action escapes the will of its initiator; second, its long-term effects remain unpredictable. The consequence is both ethical and practical: in an uncertain world, the program—a sequence of commands executed without looking outward—is ill-suited, whereas strategy, which adjusts itself in response to unforeseen events and incoming information, is the proper approach. To act is to wager, then to remain attentive to the return of that wager.
The ecology of action applies the thinking of complexity to the realm of doing: an action is not an isolated line one can extend at will, but a thread caught in a fabric of interdependencies, subject to the same reliance that binds everything to its context. What we believed we controlled from start to finish was only ever controlled at the outset.
It is sometimes confused with consequentialism, which judges an act by its results—this is the opposite. Consequentialism assumes consequences can be calculated; the ecology of action asserts their fundamental unpredictability. Nor is it fatalism: though the actor is not master of the outcome, they remain responsible for having set the action in motion. We are not answerable for what we could not foresee, but we are always answerable for having chosen to act.