Abstract

What do we mean when we talk about the “environment” inside the ecological discourse? Do we really have a clear and distinct notion of it? This paper argues that the “environment” is not a single object approached from different disciplinary angles, but a stratified epistemic field in which distinct models produce distinct results. Against the assumption of a unified environmental referent, the article reconstructs four major models of understanding: (1) the scientific model of the ecosystem, (2) the moral model of nature as value, (3) the aesthetic model of landscape, and (4) the juridical model of territory or land. Each of these models is shown to function as a specific device of objectivation, unifying heterogeneous elements according to its own rationality: systemic regulation, axiological orientation, experiential appearance, or the normative ordering of living space. Through historical and conceptual analyses, the paper demonstrates that these models are neither mutually reducible nor merely complementary perspectives on the same object. Rather, they generate different environmental objects, each governed by its own epistemic logic. What the paper suggests is that the environment remains (as it should) a polyvocal concept, and that a critical epistemology of the environment, precisely because of this polyvocality, must concern itself with mapping these models and explicating their architecture and techniques of functioning.