After the rain, without anyone knowing where they came from, many snails end up on the fragile shoots in my garden. They gently show their antennae, in the early morning dew, at the top of the low and tender plants, after having taken advantage of the cover of the night to hoist themselves, in silence, up to these heights.
They are garden snails. At least, I believe so! In any case, they are in the garden… Certain species of snails, including this one, could have arrived in America with the Viking navigators. These northern peoples stocked up on snails for long journeys. Other browsers will do the same, of course. Put into dormancy, under cover of humidity and minimal heat, the snail can stay very much alive for months. It can therefore constitute a source of supply for a long time. This is one of the hypotheses to explain the presence of these living beings in the New World.
However, biologist Isabelle Picard, a specialist in these slow creatures, tells me that garden snails have been found in sites that predate the Viking presence. So that would invalidate, at least in part, the hypothesis of their arrival in America in the wake of the history of their coastal navigations.
It is not impossible, she says, that these gastropods were transported by birds. Still, we don’t really know when or how these living beings quietly conquered the New World. The presence of certain varieties of gastropods dates back 12,000 years. At Lac aux Araignées, near Mégantic, human traces were found that date back to about this period when caribou were everywhere.
In any case, the gastropod has a sense of duration, like that of travel. As slow as it is, this mollusk has gone through history. The snail has made its way through time, learning to withdraw into itself, in the patience of the existence it knows how to transmit, by fertilizing each other. His future advances slowly, on a trail of drool. But he is moving forward. It can travel up to 3 km per year. Every day, he swallows, very slowly, up to forty times his weight. And although excessively slow, he is there, whatever happens, every morning, climbing on my plants. He holds on. His intuition is correct. Can the same be said of ours?
Ivan Illich once had a thought of his own about the snail. The snail, he observed, builds over the days the delicate architecture of the shell which sustains its life. The animal adds, one after the other, ever wider whorls which constitute what, in our eyes, characterizes it the most. Then, writes Illich, “it abruptly ceases and begins windings this time decreasing”. In this way, it reinforces its achievements, in a sort of strategic withdrawal into itself, which has the effect of consolidating its existence.
What would happen if its shell, on the contrary, continued to grow? When fully grown as an adult, “a single, even larger whorl would make the shell sixteen times larger,” notes Illich. In other words, “instead of contributing to the well-being of the animal, it would overload it” with a volume that would make it unfit to exist. “Past the limit point of enlargement of the whorls, the problems of overgrowth multiply in geometric progression, while the biological capacity of the snail can, at best, only follow an arithmetic progression. »
Arrived at a point, the snail dissociates itself from the geometric expansion, in the name of its survival, because an accumulation without limits risks killing it. What happens to us, molluscs, in a society based on the principle of limitless accumulation?
In one year, in the midst of a health crisis, billionaires have accumulated an additional 3.6 trillion dollars. The equivalent of 12 times Canada’s annual budget. To live like these people do, and sustain the obsessive growth of their wealth, will soon require other planets. It must now be a question, we are told, of “sustainable growth”. But can the development to infinity, in the name of such a perfectly bogus oxymoron, really last? And what can this future mean when we are penniless, without a roof, when our schools and our hospitals are collapsing? In truth, an unprecedented development of inequalities has begun under the noses of the snails that we are.
Will we be able to cower for much longer under the precarious shell of our illusions? The life of the snail has never held, in any case, to an electoral horizon. Society, like the gastropod, advances slowly. It takes time to gain some ground. We are not going faster than history.
Should plans for the future be reduced to the empty shells that we are served, lost somewhere between the life on Mars dreamed of by billionaires, a tunnel under the river and the fabulous memory of a more glorious past? ? The decrease in inequalities and the ecological footprint that accompanies it, is this not the guarantee of a more sustainable and happy horizon for society?
Snails do not all end up drowned in butter, at the bottom of the plates of those who always show themselves ready to eat them. We are not obliged, today, to let ourselves be plunged and drowned in the frog juice in which we stagnate, in the name of a constant diversion of what should be the pride of living together.