Anthropological Approach to Vulnerability and Major Hazards - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 266

amounts to a “triple and mutual creation” [BER 00, p. 96] of the
human species in relation to that surrounds it:
- a hominization (the species becomes sapiens by exteriorizing its
actions in symbols);
- a humanization ( sapiens diversify culturally by organizing their
symbols into languages);
-an anthropization (the environment conforms increasingly
progressively to human needs).
This process of “hominescence” [MOR 13] explains why the
human milieu very particularly modifies the environment (that is to
say, the milieu shared by all species). By adapting what surrounds
them to their own needs, humans do what other life forms do but,
because of the organization of symbols and techniques into systems
(of languages and technocraties), the transformations' orders of size
have been considerably multiplied.
A very strong interdependance has been built up between humans
and their environments. On the one hand, the scale of human impact
on their surroundings is taken to a geological level. This is
the anthropocene hypothesis [STE11] according to which the
environmental conditions that affect all life forms (that is to say the
biosphere in its entirety) are profoundly linked to human behavior
[BON 13]. On the other hand, contemporary humans would not know
how to live without the technological (from clothes to habitations, via
tools and the use of non-edible energy resources) and symbolic
modifications (from languages to information systems, from moral
values to ethical concerns, etc.) through the means of which they are
in a position to create and interact with what surrounds them. Due to
the work of Leroi-Gourhan, we know that this coevolution and
codependance is in continuity with a long-standing historic trajectory.
It fell to the geographer Augustin Berque to show that not only
does the human species exteriorize its animal functions in tools
(it makes knives, for example, which assume - among others - the
function of the claws and teeth of carnivores), but also it equally
operates the reverse: it interiorizes its tools with a symbolic value