“A million quiet revolutions. The statement, which the French philosopher Laurence Hansen-Løve borrows from her fellow journalist Bénédicte Manier, will make Quebecers smile. The first explains that it “evokes a global awareness followed by an attempt to ‘reclaim’ civil society by itself, in reaction against a political world perceived globally as ‘disinvested in the common good’”.
For the essayist, born Laurence Bonnecarrère in Paris in 1948, it is a “revolution, but which, she insists, “does not resemble those we have known until today” . Its planetary nature, in no way subject to precise rulers, escapes a strict category. The title of Laurence Hansen-Løve’s book, Boiling planetdefines both its strength and its secret around the words “ecology, feminism and responsibility”.
“The planetary revolution that I will attempt to describe and define actually proceeds from the conjunction or variation of several mutations, crises or cataclysms which have occurred in parallel, in different regions of the world, and which relate moreover to the most important areas. more varied. The new approach to the environmental question is central to my remarks. »
The awareness in so many different countries, the essayist considers it to be “exploded, protean”, independent of progressive and utopian traditions without however denying them. A citizen rather than a politician despite her frequent questioning of statesmen and women, she stands, sums up Laurence Hansen-Løve, “generally aloof from parties and traditional modes of action”. It is often, concludes the philosopher, “the work of women” and young people who distrust capitalism.
The names of Swedish environmentalist teenager Greta Thunberg, frenzied activist, successful Canadian polemicist Naomi Klein (52) and 30-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a protesting Democratic representative in Washington, spring to mind. The essayist cites them of course, but his book, a very up-to-date encyclopedia of social change, is full of other references.
Nourished by the history of philosophy, Laurence Hansen-Løve finds in the thinker Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) the inspiring idea of a harmony between human beings and nature which deserves to replace the old idea of human domination of nature. This intellectual revolution, will continue it Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, in 1962, will see in this last the “founder of the sciences of man”.
But these remain scholarly reminders that are a little cold. Fortunately, Laurence Hansen-Løve takes up, with contagious conviction, the very dramatic than Greta Thunberg delivered to the UN in 2019. It read: “Entire ecosystems are collapsing, we are at the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you talk about is money and tales of fairies of eternal economic growth? How dare you ? »
Can we better sum up the anger of a global counter-power, which, even if still so limited, knows how to see nature, no longer as our slave, but as our sister?