Last week, several months after the official funeral of Quebec astrophysicist Hubert Reeves at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, his relatives in Quebec gathered to scatter, in accordance with his wishes, part of his ashes around the Îles de la Paix in Lake Saint-Louis.
It was in Bellevue (now Léry), on the shores of this lake, that Hubert Reeves, as a young man, first looked the stars in the eyes. Every summer, he stayed there with his grandmother Charlotte, who was also my mother’s grandmother, his cousin. So it was on the porch of her house that my great-grandmother gathered her grandchildren to tell them stories. And it was there that Hubert Reeves says he developed a taste for storytelling, which led him to popular science.
In his astrophysicist’s gaze, there was the infinitely large and the infinitely small, and, for that very reason, he had a perspective that few humans have. His science allowed him to evaluate the date of the death of the Sun, to delve into the mystery of the big bang that gave birth to the universe and to understand the threat of nuclear war. His view of us, stardust wandering, often blind, in the world, was necessarily transformed.
I remember his amusement in answering, as if to challenge, the many and so diverse questions that were put to him. I remember especially the hope that he had instilled in me, one of the last times that I spoke to him, a few years ago, about global warming and my eco-anxiety. He told me that he was encouraged to see the awareness of this threat increase tenfold in the world population over the years.
It is rare now to hear these rigorous, courageous, and above all independent voices leading the way amidst the news recounting disasters and whipping up eco-anxiety and the betrayed promises of international treaties. Hubert Reeves has defended the ecological cause one project at a time, from opposing the hunting of wood turtle doves above the Médoc to rejecting the Suroît gas plant in Quebec.
In the scientific world, concerns about climate change began to surface in the 1970s. But even for a scientist of his caliber, it was when the environmental threat shook his personal world that Hubert Reeves was most affected. “What affected me most deeply,” he wrote in 2008 in I will not have time, This is the bad news coming from Quebec about the health of the St. Lawrence River. As children, we used to swim in it. What a shock when I learned, a few decades ago, that it had become “the trash can of North America.” At that time, he also noticed a decline in the butterfly and swallow populations in Malicorne’s garden in Puisaye, France, where he liked to retreat. It was precisely at that moment, he explains, that he became fully involved in the ecological cause.
He could very well quantify this threat. In the little book entitled Astronomy and Ecology. Answers to Frequently Asked Questionspublished by Frémeaux & Associés, he discusses three catastrophic scenarios of long-term global warming. But, knowing himself to be small, knowing himself to be stardust, born of a species among millions of species, he suggests, quite simply, to follow the example of the turtle, which has more than two hundred million years of existence behind it while human beings have only existed for three million years. “If we asked turtles the recipe for their longevity, they could answer ‘living in harmony with nature’. On this point, in the ranking of living species, we are in last place, at the bottom of the ladder. If we do not learn the lesson of the turtles, we are very likely to perish,” he writes in The fury of living (2020). Living in harmony with nature is not the strong point of modern man, whose intelligence far exceeds that of the turtle.
But when it comes to survival, despair is not a valid option. “Her approach is that the future is not written. The future depends on the decisions that are made now. It is not because we are in a catastrophic period that we cannot do anything,” testified her son Benoit shortly after her death. Filmmaker Iolande Cadrin-Rossignol, who made four films with Hubert Reeves, including The Earth seen from the heart And The ocean seen from the heartis deeply imbued with this hope. She told me, very recently, that she wanted to make a film about a phenomenon that many scientists are currently studying: all the solutions are in nature. Another film that brings hope, again and again, because it is necessary.