In her columns, our collaborator Nathalie Plaat calls for your stories. In “While the Fields Burn”, she asked you, knowing that renunciation is not an option, how to resist and make sense of the meta-decisions relating to climate change. The “News from you” section has included a few extracts.
During the holidays, we took a cruise in the Thousand Islands with the aim of visiting Boldt Castle to please the oldest of our two daughters, aged six, who is passionate about unicorns, princesses and castles. who shelter them. On the boat, a voice reported the landscape, what was on the different islands that we passed. Essentially islands belonging to rich capitalists on which there were houses and villas which prompted the taking of serial photos.
This show took me back to Dahlia Namian’s essay, The provocative societyin which the author denounces the obscenity of the ultra-rich who buy islands in particular to protect themselves from possible crises or catastrophes, which they will paradoxically have largely contributed to causing through their excessive and destructive behavior.
We felt great discomfort with this celebration of the capitalist system which nevertheless generates terrible social inequalities, which continue to widen. Wanting to highlight the excess before us, my chum designated our youngest, aged three, a yacht garage, at least ten times bigger than our house. Faced with this absurdity, she exclaimed: “No, look there, ducks! » showing him three ducks on the water right next to the island where the yachts were located. We burst out laughing, we were happy, proud and admiring his look, which had made the ducks triumph. I was touched.
Since then, I have often thought about this episode, which I told friends, and I promised myself that I would try to make the ducks triumph in my turn. I told myself that I had to continue to fight so that the gaze of my daughter and the rest of the world could still choose to focus on the ducks in the St. Lawrence River.
I promised myself that I would choose the ducks, despite the temptation to inertia caused by our feeling of powerlessness in the face of the behavior of the ultra-rich and our governments, who have chosen the side of yachts and private jets. I promised myself that I would choose ducks, which light up my daughter’s eyes rather than growth, performance and efficiency which, at best, indifferent to her.
For me, this promise means protesting, a lot, but also slowing down and giving up habits and privileges that contribute to the acceleration of climate change. This is not a question of deprivation, of a vain individual effort, while others give it their all, but of a paradigm shift.
For me, it is an ethical posture which refers to the indigenous concept, particularly used in Ecuador, to live wellin Spanish, or sumak kawsay, in Quechua, which is based on the principle of a harmonious relationship between human beings and nature. A concept which enjoins us to resist in order to live well with nature, of which we are an integral part and which we must embrace to rediscover our capacity for wonder and the beauty of the world around us.