“If the state can shut down economic activities in response to a global pandemic, why couldn’t it counter a much greater planetary threat? This is the serious, pressing, somewhat insidious question posed by Maya Jegen, a political scientist at UQAM, in her book The state in the face of the environmental crisis. For her, “the state already plays a key role” in avoiding catastrophe. “But, she says, time is running out. »
A graduate of the University of Geneva, a specialist in energy and environmental policies, Maya Jegen is convinced, like the vast majority of ecologists, that the planet has entered the Anthropocene era (from the Greek anthropos“human being”, and kainos, “new”, suffix qualifying a geological period). She thus recalls that across the globe, “human activities disturb ecosystems and the climate”.
Based on the work of the Dutchman Paul J. Crutzen (1933-2021), this meteorologist, atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995, the political scientist fixes the beginning of the Anthropocene in the last half of the 18th century.e century, when analysis of air bubbles encased in ice shows carbon dioxide and methane rising in the atmosphere. This change coincides in time with the invention of the steam engine in Great Britain.
Technical progress marked the industrial revolution, which, underlines the political scientist, ended up greatly accelerating economic and demographic growth on a planetary scale. The latter, she notes, “tripled from 1945 to 2010, rising from 2.3 billion to 6.9 billion” inhabitants. Economic and demographic decreases appear to many observers to be necessities that can be envisaged by reducing consumption and regulating births.
In March 2020, the coronavirus spread all over the planet. Schools, universities, businesses and borders have been closed. Some were concerned about the attacks on freedom, but others saw this newfound state capacity as a good omen for tackling the climate crisis.
However, the concept of “sustainable development”, dear to moderate ecologists, arouses the skepticism of radical ecologists, to the point, according to Maya Jegen, of being accused of “hypocritical farce”. On the other hand, carbon pricing remains an insufficient measure. Despite her academic caution, the political scientist recognizes, on the contrary, that the activism of young radical women brings an effective, unprecedented, anti-bureaucratic breath to environmentalism.
Maya Jegen mentions the Fridays for Future movement exemplified by Swedish Greta Thunberg (b. 2003), instigator of the global student strike to solve the climate crisis, and German Luisa Neubauer (b. 1996), who went, in his country, even going to court to defend the ecological rights of future generations.
Instead of appearing technical, the change is meant to be sociological, very human, very profound. It becomes, thanks to young women, nothing less than a revolution, the only phenomenon capable of rapidly preventing the onset of catastrophe.