Eco-design of Marine Infrastructures. Sylvain Pioch
Foreword
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Our planet and our ecosystems are in danger and we must act. Of course, we hear this message every day and most of us are now aware of it. However, it is not easy to exactly identify the different challenges ahead, and it is even less easy to act accordingly.
Intended for a wide audience, this book can help provide answers. It presents, through concrete examples and testimonies, an exhaustive state of the art allowing everyone to better understand marine eco-design and the issues it addresses. It also proposes a methodology for acting differently. Although this book is primarily intended for technicians, engineers, scientists and students, it may be of interest to anyone who is curious to see how we can “develop” by taking inspiration from nature. For this book is not only the story of two men of art, it is also the work of two marine enthusiasts who, for more than 30 years, have been working for the preservation of the seabed; passionate people who have spent hundreds of hours in the water observing, marveling at marine life and trying to understand the combination of elements and the consequences on biodiversity. I have shared this passion with them for many years.
Through this book, Sylvain and Jean-Claude, who are great professionals and long-time friends, will share their universe with you. Through concrete experiences, you will discover the marine world, see through their eyes the underwater biotope and how to preserve it and perhaps feel its mysteries in order to reconcile what seems irreconcilable: the human impact of a maritime infrastructure and the preservation of biodiversity. Sylvain Pioch combines both a sixth sense of this wilderness and an exceptional scientific knowledge. His ability to understand and predict the behavior of fish and marine life will always amaze me. He is, at the same time, a renowned professor, a researcher and a talented designer, recognized throughout the world. Jean-Claude Souche is the one who makes it possible to transform concepts into sustainable developments and infrastructures. Today, Jean-Claude is a professor at IMT Mines Alès, a French engineering school, where he heads the civil engineering and sustainable building department. His international experience in marine works, his operational background as an engineer and doctor and his unwavering will to move forward make him a valuable person. With their common conviction, on a professional level, Sylvain and Jean-Claude are incredibly complementary. In this book, they have produced a thorough work on the eco-design of marine infrastructures, which for them is definitive work. This book highlights one of the great challenges of our century, that of preserving marine biodiversity through our land use planning policy and the construction of coastal and port infrastructures. The protection of the environment in terms of maritime development is no longer based on simple compensatory measures, but must, by definition for any project, preserve and promote the development of life and its diversity. I am deeply convinced that project owners, engineers, scientists and contractors can and must play a major role in promoting biodiversity and thus protecting the marine environment. One of the major challenges to come will be to know how to create industrial policies that are economically efficient and respectful of our environment. It is no longer a question of opposing environment and economy or human technology and nature, but, on the contrary, of reconciling them. This requires skill and conviction. Even though science and technology are not the only solution to the problems of today’s world, they provide technical innovation that can lead to changes in human behavior. This is the goal of this book, to allow as many people as possible to understand the stakes, to act intelligently and, finally, to think differently.
Also, throughout these pages, I urge you to think about what we will leave to future generations, I urge you to become the children of the Little Prince because it is possible to change the world, provided we all change, provided we first change ourselves.
Enjoy reading this book.
Régis DUMAY
Deputy Managing Director, Egis
Preface
The distance of man’s emancipation from the sea is equal to the distance of our cells from the composition of sea water.
Loren Eiseley
The purpose of this book is to strengthen the path towards a coastal maritime management where civil maritime engineering is intimately linked with environmental engineering, within a socio-ecosystem where humanity is an integral part of nature. The multiple consequences of the mistreatment of nature by a denatured human will not be discussed in this book. Indeed, it seems to us that the links between the artificialization of the seabed, climate change, pollution, the introduction of invasive species or the overexploitation of natural resources with a deregulated, predatory and irresponsible anthropic activity for the future of ecosystems and the survival of humanity (on our unique Earth) are obvious (IPBES 2019). Neither are we prophets, as the concepts discussed here have already been the subject of modern works (Belknap et al. 1967; Falque 1972; Tarlet 1977) or of older, empirical findings, where humans have also illustrated themselves in their capacity for positive interactions with nature (McHarg 1969; Lassus 2002).
The geographer and planner McHarg (1969)1 detected that in our current modern societies (since the second half of the 20th century), technicists, industrialists and urbanists have an attitude to the human that is dissociated, pre-Copernican and dominant towards nature. The source of this segregative reflection is that we have been fed by an ancient instinct of revenge towards nature, born of a 1,000-year-old resentment of having held so little influence before nature. Psychoanalysts would call this a “complex of cultural inferiority, with perverse aggressive tendency”, that is, without consideration, nor empathy, nor feeling for the tormented object. This conception of nature, which is the subject of our predation, would satisfy the desire for primacy buried deep within the human being, for a long time inoffensive since impossible to achieve technically. How can we make this resentment, which we have historically inherited as a consequence of our environment, null and void? How can we prevent it from poisoning the objective of survival and evolution of a human who can now “stand up among the other forms of life” (McHarg 1969)? The expression of our work on eco-design is rooted in our enthusiasm to assert our talents as creators, rather than those of destroyers who are less worthy to represent responsible humans, the managers of their environment and thus of their future.
This exercise is, moreover, made difficult by the Western conception founded on an anthropocentrism disassociated with nature, notably spiritually (Berque 1986). The oriental approach, for example, the Japanese approach using Tao, Shinto or Zen, has sometimes ignored the human as an individual to focus on the human within nature (the garden being the metaphysical symbol par excellence).
In short, two reverse postulates exist: in the West, the human at the expense of nature, and, in the East, nature at the expense of the individual human. The third view would be that of a balance, which does not mean a fusion, where the human is considered as an individual, rather than as a species, within nature.
To date, however, this way has not been expressed in human “works” presented on the maritime domain (principally the submerged part), which have never taken into account natural facts in their intrinsic conception. It is the human against nature, which is understood in maritime engineering as a vocabulary of work or technique: works of defense against the sea, breakwaters, dikes, wave-breaking walls, seawalls, dredging, etc.
On the contrary, land constructions have long been based on a local empirism (the vernacular), allowing humans to observe nature and to settle there harmoniously. The low stone walls follow the curves of hillsides where the peasantry, better than any other profession, know by observation how to exploit and manage the land. There are also our medieval “circulade” Mediterranean villages, where the air circulates wonderfully and naturally refreshes the shaded alleys, offering