It’s fantastic that spring break coincides with a heatwave this year; we will have time to open the swimming pool, play golf or drink a local IPA on a terrace.
I recently read in The world that following the state of emergency in Barcelona at the beginning of February, a hotel had covered the floor with green spray paint. We are here in trompe l’oeil. It’s the little gesture that counts, they say. The Catalan city has barely had any fresh water for a while and already has a plan to bring it in by tanker from Marseille.
The average citizen prefers not to make the connection between his steak on the barbecue, his trip to Florida or Croatia, his SUV which promises him freedom on the roads of the Yukon national parks AND the fact that he can play Spikeball on his lawn with the children during the school break. But he makes the connection more easily when it comes to recycling a plastic cap, taking his bags to the grocery store and not using tissue paper (by cutting up pieces of washable tissue to blow his nose).
We call it tokenism, symbolic gestures that can apply to many things in a world where bad faith is fairly well distributed. This comes from token, tokens. Small change, window dressing.
I, too, make small gestures. It doesn’t cost anything, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t change the world, and it gives me a clear conscience. I circulate veggie recipes on my Instagram and I cry like Réjean Tremblay’s wife on Nathalie Normandeau’s microphone after an interview with Denis Lévesque. “ Live free or die » worse “ think big, stie”. (The ref is here at 11:50 p.m.)
From angelism to “doomism”
And there will always be a smatte to remind you that we live better than 100 years ago. It’s certain that your bidet with heated seat is an improvement on the mess in the yard at -30 degrees Celsius with gazette nailed to the wall (the trash paper of the time) that my grandfather experienced, in Gaspésie. It is certain that we have made progress. The problem is that we can no longer stop it. Nor to define ourselves without.
It takes infinite patience to always wait for what never happens.
The problem is that no one can say that things will be better in 50, or even 30 years. It’s even the opposite if you went outside this week and realized that off-piste skiing was a childhood memory. In France, in the Vosges, snow is delivered at night to ski centers by truck. The past is no longer a guarantor of the future and this future is no longer what it was.
To deny it is to fall into denial or eccentricity. You can call it pessimism, bitterness or “doomism”, but I assure you, on the heads of our kids lobotomized to screens of all kinds, that there is a price to pay for playing golf in Granby in February. I hope that one day, we will transform the golf courses into community vegetable gardens. It will grow on its own. If there is any water left.
While waiting for this blessed day, I have just finished reading an astonishing essay by the American biologist Rob Dunn, translated under the title A natural history of the future. Nobody listens to scientists — except when it suits us — but we can still read them. I tend to believe them more than a press release from the Ministry of the Environment under the CAQ regime.
We are just a clumsy giant who arrived late on stage, a character in the play of life who will not see the curtain fall.
The biologist explains to us the laws of nature from which we cannot escape. And there are many of them. You don’t need to have done ayahuasca in Sainte-Adèle to understand that we are part of life: “There is no border between us and nature. We are as wild today as we have been since the beginning,” writes the biologist. It’s just that toilet paper now has three layers. And that we have gotten ourselves up to our necks in shit as a so-called “intelligent” species. Microbes have a bigger future than us.
No one listened to Noah
Scientists like Robert Dunn (professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University and the University of Copenhagen) tell us that we seem to have underestimated the acceleration of current warming. Dunn mentions three possible scenarios developed by the IPCC: an optimistic one – RCP2.6 – which we have already exceeded, a less optimistic one which requires radical change without delay (RCP4.5): “If you live today at little fter the way you lived ten years ago, in terms of diet, daily transportation, travel, or heating and cooling patterns, you are unlikely to be on the trajectory that this scenario demands. » And even with this scenario, we would reach the 2 degrees Celsius increase.
But the most likely scenario, says business as usual, RCP8.5, would severely affect 3.5 billion humans within 60 years. Dunn notes that climate scientists are promoting the first plan publicly — RCP2.6 — but preparing for the last plan, inaction, and calling real estate agents in Canada or Sweden asking: ” Is there running water all year round? » “They discuss with their colleagues which politically stable countries will be spared from malaria. »
In short, it’s Noah’s syndrome.
I had all this in mind when I started crying at the microphone of Penelope on Radio-Canada last week about the environment. A few more tears in a very rough sea.
It is as if the accumulation of knowledge resulted in the negation of knowledge. […] In search of security, we constantly produce the ingredients of growing insecurity.
To console myself, I took out the book by the agrophilosopher Pierre Rabhi, Gaia’s sadness. I took these two sweet sentences from it: “Thank you to these beneficial souls to whom we owe a real progress in consciousness to propagate “Love” energy and promote this true intelligence that I believe is the only one capable of generating harmony. Having named and recognized it gives us the opportunity to relate to it and the strength to overcome our primal inclination to predation that is not only legalized but admired. »Amen.