While nature is falling apart everywhere, the multiple hopes that humans placed in its future are now being bitterly disappointed. Because although it is an exceptional fruit of evolution, with climate change, it appears more and more like an undue growth.
It must be said that humans have foolishly placed all their hopes in science. Believing only in it, he took it into his head to modify nature and increase its yield so that it would be 100% compatible and useful to him. At this stage, we no longer speak of scientific exploration, but more correctly… of scientific exploitation!
We must note that the 100 billion neurons that make up our brain are a generosity of evolution that we would probably have benefited from without! Didn’t the biologist Jean Rostand say of the human brain that it was a monstrous tumor of the universe? (Confidences of a biologist, p. 207) With our lanky bodies and big heavy heads, we look more like scarecrows lost in the wild than the gods of Olympus…
When will we finally understand that over the course of evolution we have become abnormal with respect to the living order?
Because although our intelligence is something extraordinary in itself, it has become so invasive that it has become unable to keep its distance from the eminently fragile order of the living.
However, in their wisdom, didn’t Plato and Socrates affirm that, whatever he does, the human always acts for his own good? Would we then be faced with behavior of a new kind? Why, faced with the imminent danger that the current state of the planet represents for us, have we not acted drastically for our own good and still prefer to be satisfied with honeyed half-measures from politicians?
It must be said that, in his pride, the human accepts with difficulty not to consider himself as the undisputed master of the Earth. He had, he believed, succeeded in previous centuries in taming it by agriculture and then by industrialization… And he still prefers today to show himself in perfect control and continues blindly to ensure that it is still totally indebted to him.
However, this planet no longer recognizes itself. It languishes under tons and tons of toxic waste of all kinds. It’s been turned into a flying dump!
This marvel of the universe, the blue planet, from which the human species emerged one day, is currently being transformed before our eyes into a vast tomb.
Already in the XIXe century, Nietzsche (1844-1900) did not hesitate to say that our reason, however extraordinary it may be, far from being a sign of superiority, is rather the premise of all our illusions as to our future. Let us listen to the fable he had invented: in some remote corner of the universe scattered in the blaze of innumerable solar systems, there was once a star on which intelligent animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and deceitful minute in universal history: but it was only a minute. (The Philosopher’s Book, Paris, Aubier Flammarion, 1969, p. 171)
You might as well then accept it right away: the XXIe century will be the beginning of the end for theHomo sapiens. We have reached a point of no return. After ignoring the warnings of all environmental specialists for at least 30 years, today we are hitting a wall! It is too late to remedy the situation and we must deal with it now. It’s the only option we have left!
Sooner or later, the shaggy being that we are will disappear from the terrestrial landscape to give way to beings less intelligent than us, of course, but in harmony with nature. Let us recall that in this one nothing is definitively acquired. What we meet there is an incredible panoply of living beings always in a situation of precarious balance. And it is a pity that in our wild ambitions we have forgotten this simple premise.
We could dream, thanks to our advanced technology, of going to live elsewhere on other planets to compensate for our current dantesque situation, that would not change the situation. At best, we risk finding ourselves confronted with exactly the same challenge that made our condemnation on Earth: to reconcile the excesses of our intelligence with the nature that we would find there.