Anthropological Approach to Vulnerability and Major Hazards - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 265

behaves depending on what he/she perceives, that is to say not
depending on the environment “in itself” but on the aspects that
appear significant or vital to him/her. Perception of the environment
varies not only depending on innate qualities (belonging to a species),
but also according to the acquired aptitudes (belonging to a
developing milieu). The perceptive matrix is not the same from one
individual to another; it depends on species and on fields of
experience that have been developed during its growth.
We are indebted to Baron Jacob Von Uexküll who demonstrated
[UEX 56] that each species does not act according to the environment
( Umgebung ) but according to its milieu ( Umwelt ). This means that a
form of life, whatever it may be, cannot perceive the environment, but
only its organic and semiotic manifestation. The environment is
“veiled” from an inate organic part (which defines a particular field of
organic stimulations) and an acquired cultural part (which favors
certain types of sensitivities and experiences). In other words, and this
is the definition that we propose, a milieu is the concrete dimension of
the environment, something with which a life form interacts in a
concrete sense. Von Uexküll was able to demonstrate this on an
ethological level, but he only sketched the specificity of human
milieux. Indeed, these milieux are characterized by a very strong
salience of the cultural dimension. Humans, more than any other
species, acquire and share competences that they do not have at birth.
We are indebted to the paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan
for demonstrating the crucial importance of the “social part” in the
formation of human milieux. His main thesis, the externalizing of
symbolic dimensions in technical systems over the lengthy time-span
of biological evolution [LER 64], shows that the evolution of the
species Homo sapiens is linked to a structuring of environmental
transformations in a human milieu. The interrelationship between
Sapiens and their surroundings has become consequential as it has
been systemized. Unlike other species, humans have organized their
meanings in languages and their actions into techniques.
From Homo habilis to H. sapiens , generations of hominids have
progressively used their milieu in an increasingly ample and
structured technical, symbolic, energetic and ecological system. This