Our propensity to move frantically, occupying in this way the earth’s surface to its highest points, the nearby sky and the great liquid plain, is it a disease? This is what the French engineer Laurent Castaignède argues in his new book Is moving around, the new disease of the century? published by Éditions Écosociété.
If we suffer today more than yesterday from our hypermobility, the now pathological nature of our movements does not constitute a recent discovery. Indeed, as early as 1906, academician Jules Claretie warned against the combined effect of increasing accessibility to already hegemonic means of transport and social mimicry. Typical Parisian usage – at least since the mid-19th centurye century – a vacation spent outside the city will be described as on the move, the term being instantly taken up by the chronicle of the time to describe the impossibility of staying still for those, ever more numerous, who had the means to travel.
Holidays, leisure, shopping, work: for a yes or for a no, heavy motorized means to move over long distances are used today, with a long journey time. Since the time of Jules Claretie, “on the move” has, so to speak, passed from the epidemic stage to that of the pandemic, first with the accelerated democratization of access to the car at the end of the Second World War. world, then more recently with the development of low-cost airlines.
If we can easily identify the symptoms – accidents, various pollution, acceleration of the spread of infectious diseases, etc. -, however, we are reluctant to name “on the move” for what it is.
” From the start, we recognize an addiction, which is a disease. Taking the car or the plane is not a trivial act. Then, it is important to choose a term that is not neutral. What advertising sells to us is freedom, social status, speed and convenience. From this point of view, it is impossible to associate the use of transport with anything negative, which is a lie. “, says the engineer and author of the book, Laurent Castaignède.
Naive confidence
Especially since these advantages (freedom, status, speed and comfort) do not benefit the greatest number, most of the time caught in traffic jams. For habits that are known to be harmful at best and, in worst cases, fatal, efforts similar to those being mobilized to prevent tobacco use are far from being deployed.
This tendency to consider only the most advantageous aspects of technologies while avoiding the consequences of their use is embodied, among other things, in the way in which the technical studies curriculum is developed. ” In economics, for example, we learn that there have been crashes, and we study them to better understand them and, ideally, to avoid their repetition, explains Mr. Castaignède. In the same vein, political science is intimately linked to history when it is interested in the different regimes that have taken place. This historical and general cultural perspective is almost absent from technical training, a situation which promotes naive confidence in the capacity of new technologies to solve problems, even though they sometimes create problems simultaneously.. “
The massive electrification of individual transport is a convincing example of this technological messianism, insofar as it is not accompanied by a reduction in the size of vehicles or restrictions aimed at reducing their use. As for the green hydrogen whose production Dominique Anglade wants to nationalize, Laurent Castaignède believes that the conversion of the current vehicle fleet to this technology would lead to a meteoric increase in electricity needs.
The lack of historical perspective also makes it possible to consider as due or immutable practices which are however recent. Believing that frequentation between peoples would promote peace to the detriment of war, the States implemented fiscal measures after World War II to promote the development of civil aviation and tourism. To this day, kerosene used by aircraft for international flights remains tax-free.
A step back
Going beyond the strict framework of tourism, this direct subsidy for on-the-go travel induces an increase in the distances traveled per person, as illustrated in Canada, for example, by the fly-in fly-out workers from the Atlantic provinces to the oil sands of Alberta.
Rather than always looking for solutions in front of us, we could try to look back a bit.
For all that, is it necessary to cure our hypermobility to adopt a lifestyle similar to that of the Amish? Not necessarily. ” Rather than always looking for the solutions in front of us, we could try to look back a bit “, suggests Laurent Castaignède. ” In 1960, in France, before households massively equipped themselves with cars and adopted the decentralized lifestyle that goes with it, the average distance to be traveled between home and work was 3 kilometers. Today it is 15 kilometers, not to mention the shopping areas, which continue to expand ever further, on the outskirts of the cities. Not so long ago, people lived, worked and consumed in the same neighborhood or arrondissement. “ The pre-1960 European city is not much different from the human scale model promoted today.
The heart of the problem is that we have not yet decided, collectively, whether transport as we know it, with no real limits on an individual scale since space tourism now exists, constitutes essential products, or, like tobacco, a poisonous substance of which we need to be cured. By ignoring the second option, we are denying fairness to the most dependent, the very people who will first feel the effects of the draconian measures that we will have to put in place sooner or later to curb the pandemic on the move.