Writer and committed citizen, the author has taught literature at college, is president of the governing board of an elementary school and member of the editorial board of Quebec letters. She co-directed and co-wrote the collective essay Shock treatments and tarts. Critical assessment of the management of COVID-19 in Quebec (All in all).
“Freshness, calm, balance. The color of the year Sico 2023 transforms the house into a haven of tranquility [émoticône goutte d’eau]. In the sponsored image that appeared on my social network, glaciers are looming. In front of them, in a blue-gray square, the paint retailer proudly reveals the name of the chosen color: melt water. Is this a joke? The whole thing is so dystopian, it has to be a joke.
Convinced of getting caught in the game with a publicity stunt, I click. I’m sure to come across a web page that will say “Because people are still too zen in the face of accelerating climate change, we have made meltwater our color of the year 2023. We are committed to reducing our use of drinking water and donate 10% of our profits to the Fondation Rivières”. But no. Nothing. Not the shadow of a beginning of societal commitment, which is nevertheless popular in the country of marketing these days. Niet : no greenwashing or real engagement on the horizon.
On this election Monday, I find myself in front of a perfect example of end of the world iconography as put forward by the Humans of Late Capitalism Instagram account, which lists “what happens when things don’t go as planned (I translate freely). The page lists the anomalies, the ” glitches in the matrix of the consumption cycle”, in the form of images that are at once strange, sad and hilarious, but which take on their full meaning when observed as products, ironic and broken, of capitalism.
Martin Loofah King (yes, it’s a bath mitt), the headline “Apple expects to benefit from climate change», the Corporate Toddlers daycare center (for the CEOs of tomorrow?), Jeff Bezos who eats an iguana, an influencer all smiles arched on a stele of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin: the stupidity, voluntary or involuntary, of our era, thirsty for experiences, consumer goods, infinite growth and entertainment, is monstrously spread out there, in an accumulation that is enough to make us “cry”.
This is what we do, by the dozens, under the sharing of this Sico America blunder. It is that on this Monday, the words of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, who urges the world to act in order to “prevent climatic disasters and save the human species”, resonate in our minds: “There It is a matter of life and death for us, for our security today and for our survival tomorrow. »
While “glaciers distinct from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are rapidly shrinking, altering regional hydrology, rising global sea levels and increasing natural hazards,” noted a study in Nature in 2021, marketers thought electing “meltwater” color of the year 2023 was a good idea. During the entire laborious approval process, no one batted an eyelid.
When will the “California Fire Orange”, “Oil Spill Black” and “Horne Foundry Gray” appear?
The triumph of arsenic
That evening, the melting of the ice would join another type of melting: that of the Horne foundry, while we watched, dumbfounded, the defeat of Émilise Lessard-Therrien, of Québec solidaire, in Rouyn-Noranda–Témiscamingue. . The one who asked Glencore to dip into his own pocket rather than that of taxpayers to reduce air pollution bowed to his CAQ opponent, Daniel Bernard, engineer, municipal councilor and former mining lobbyist.
The youth and residents of the neighborhoods adjoining the foundry received the result as a blow to the heart; It is difficult for them not to perceive this victory as the triumph of extractivism and corporate profits over the health of the population. The multinational, which paid out $3.7 billion to its shareholders on 1er half of 2022 and earmarked $1.5 billion to settle its ongoing corruption cases in Africa, Switzerland and the Netherlands, “don’t give a damn about us,” many say. The same people who believe that the environment should have been the question of the ballot box – and not only in Rouyn.
“If you want to close it, the foundry, we will close it,” proclaimed François Legault the previous week, when closure was never the objective of Québec solidaire. This rhetoric of fear had its effect, however, and 12,975 voters decided that the CAQ was the best choice for their region, once again throwing the towel on the absence of its representative to two debates on the environment because of “scheduling conflict” as well as on the secretiveness of Horacio Arruda, still assistant deputy minister at the General Directorate of Public Health, in the cancer data file.
Notably thanks to this gain, the province has become almost entirely powder blue, which must make a certain satirist group laugh that we would still like to see confront our politicians… While the right to pollute can still be bought, we say to ourselves that our walls will be the color of arsenic or raw water so that we can fall asleep longer while the fetuses of small weights are born, the lungs become cancerous, the climatic refugees flock. “Continue”, there is nothing to see, would repeat a certain party. “Move backwards”, would launch others. “Aren’t you sick of dying, you bunch of cavers? Péloquin would say.
If we don’t get our heads out of the (bituminous) sand now, it’s easy to imagine a whole anthology of ends of the world, tragically Instagrammable, on which Richard Desjardins will sing in sound, in smog and in light… here there, bread and games. And we’ll have plenty to get our teeth into Humans of Late Capitalism at the 2029 Asian Winter Games, which will take place… in the oil-rich and desert lands… of Saudi Arabia.