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Pablo Servigne and the industrial food system 0:00 My interest was piqued by everything I'd heard about it. There we go, it's rolling. Play? So I was actually an agronomy student. That was my basic training. That was from '96 to 2002. I studied agronomy in Belgium, even though I'm French. I ended up a tropical agronomist. And then afterwards, I changed my life, still in science, but I did a doctorate in ethology on the behavior of ants.
0:33 And then after that, I stopped doing science and went into popular education, still in Belgium, which is very common there and massively state-funded. It's very interesting. And so, coming out of that academic world, out of that university cocoon which I actually loved a lot—I spent 12 years at university—I found myself facing an audience, still doing research, PowerPoints, articles, but for a general public, in French, across all social classes and all backgrounds. So that's what drives me today: going out and sharing all these discoveries, all these scientific PDF articles we receive directly, every week, which we decipher.
1:16 Then I try to synthesize them, to share them with as many people as possible, across all backgrounds. And here, I'm coming back a bit—it's been a long time since I was in a university, I'm glad to be back. Thank you for having me. I've prepared, also at the request to be brilliant, a fairly dense, fast-paced, rather scientific talk. I hope that will be okay for you. Don't hesitate to come back to things afterwards with questions. I'll try to keep up a pace so I can lay out plenty of leads for the debate.
1:47 And our new book is coming out in ten days, two weeks. So we've kept on doing research. It's a kind of overview covering several years, several books. So, it might be a bit dense, but at least you'll get a global picture, which I think is quite interesting and stimulating, especially for agronomy students. So to begin with, when I left university, in popular education, I had done a study on post-oil, oil-free agriculture.
2:20 And at the time, for me, in agronomic scientific circles, people talked about future threats and risks. And one bullet point on the PowerPoint was the climate, but one bullet point was just the problem of fossil fuels. And then we moved on, that was it. I just saw it touched on like that, barely skimmed. And then in other circles, later I frequented specialists in peak oil, peak gas, etc.—ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. And there, it was the opposite.
2:50 They had every detail on oil, oil peaks, the future of extraction, etc. And then they said, among future risks and threats, there was one bullet point: agriculture and food. And they didn't elaborate. And nobody made the connection. And I asked several researchers, are there any studies in Europe on post-oil agriculture, oil-free agriculture. How do you farm intensively enough to feed everyone, without oil, without tractors, pesticides, insecticides—which consume a lot of energy—fertilizers, etc.
3:26 All of that consumes energy. There was no research lab on it. I found one research center, one institute, in the United States, in Kansas, called the Land Institute—I recommend you look it up, founded around Wes Jackson. He's written books, it's fascinating. But otherwise, nothing. And so, at Yves Cochet's request, I had produced a report for the European Parliament, in 2013, on the future of food systems in Europe. Yves Cochet's request. So he was already noted within political ecology circles. No, this young man may seem a bit outside the usual circuits.
4:04 And in fact, he's actually right at the top of political ecology, the Yves Cochets of this world. I've dealt with him. And on the possibility of catastrophes, and thus of resilience. Are our food systems resilient? That report then led to a book, a first book, Feeding Europe in Times of Crisis. And actually, to really grasp the issue, here you have a typical family, well, typical, in Mali I think, or Chad, I don't remember. And a well-known photographer, Peter Menzel, asked these families—there's a whole series of photos in many countries around the world—to lay out a week's worth of food in front of them.
4:44 And so here, we see large families, right, burlap sacks, bulk goods, mostly grains, a bit of oilseeds, spices, oil. Here, this is in Bolivia. You can see it's fairly similar. Large families, lots of bulk items, and this time quite a lot of fruit and vegetables. Here, large families too, but in Egypt. And we already see the food system changing. We already see meat appearing, packaging, fast sugars, industrial products.
5:18 Same in Mexico, where things change considerably, if only because the family has gone through its demographic transition. And we see a lot, a lot of sugary drinks, even bottled water, and a lot of fast sugars and fruit and vegetables, and still a bit of bulk goods. Here we're in Europe, in Germany, again four families, four people in the family, and we see the food system behind it. We see what's called the industrial food system.
5:51 Almost everything is packaged, with heavily processed products, a lot of meat and dairy, a lot of protein. And here, this is the peak, the summit, I'd say. In the United States, we have a food system that's really the archetype of the industrial system. Here, there are two tomatoes, we can see, we have a bit of grapes. Otherwise, everything is fluorescent, plastic.
6:21 And in fact, these products are just the visible tip of the iceberg of the food system. It's not just agriculture. Of course, there's agriculture, and the agriculture we're talking about is one based on homogeneity, ultra-mechanization, massive consumption of fossil energy, as I said earlier. To make nitrogen fertilizer, you need a lot of natural gas. That's the Haber-Bosch process, which won the Nobel Prize at the beginning of the century, the 20th century.
6:54 And an extraction industry for fertilizers, like phosphates, etc. And so, homogeneity so machines can be run through, mechanization, hence oil, and hence a linear industrial process. That—the extraction industries, homogeneity, you see? So uniformity. We're in ideology here. I mean at the level of...
The semantic field of evil: linear, homogeneous, industrial 7:24 It's while he's speaking. So far, I haven't heard him say anything foolish. I mean, this isn't my field. But at the factual level, he hasn't said anything wrong. But just the words he uses—we're no longer in science. We're in religion. These are the words of evil. Linear, pyramidal, homogeneous, extraction, an industrial agriculture, an industrial food system. And so?
7:54 Termites chew. Ants chew all their food before feeding it to the queen. That's already a transformation. So what? Is that why it's bad? Honey is an extraordinary industrial process of transformation. Honey, yes. A natural industry, if I may say so. No, I say that because I'm taking the opportunity to introduce something that's going to be crucial. I know a lot of people who position themselves on the far left in ecological discourse and who therefore call themselves anti-capitalist.
8:32 So far, that's coherent. The far left. And actually, when you listen to them closely, they're not anti-capitalist at all. They're anti-industrial. They're against the industrial world. And since they can't imagine—they didn't live through the era of the Cold War, the Soviet Union—since there's no alternative to an industrial world other than capitalism, the two get conflated. And so evil becomes industry. That's why I'm picking up on this. I'm picking up on that word.
9:02 The last three words: linear, industrial, homogeneous. This guy, the ease with which he speaks, is admirable. You can see he radiates intelligence. He's not the fool, not the convulsive type, not the ecologist, I mean, the fantastical type where you'd feel the apocalypse is about to crash down on him, even though he's known for that, for collapse. I mean, but still, he takes some distance from collapse. At least individually, anyway. You don't get the sense of a guy who feels threatened. He might say we are collectively, but individually, he doesn't seem depressive.
9:39 He's not convulsive, which is quite reassuring, actually. Well, he wouldn't be everything he is, he wouldn't have this ease, he wouldn't have this discourse, if he hadn't been raised, from a young age, in an industrial world, protected from disease by dairy products, by things that are hyper-controlled, monitored, because nowadays, to put a food product on sale, contrary to what people say, that we eat any old thing—come on, it's never been so controlled.
10:10 I see the number of food poisoning cases there were in my grandmothers' time, my aunts', etc. It was appalling, when there was no fridge, just the pantry, just that. There you go. I'm saying obvious things for now, but things that are never talked about. And what strikes me is the semantic field, right away. I'd like everything, if you don't mind. I won't hold the floor for long, because what he's saying interests me, I'd like to come back to it, but, to be clear, right away, I'm introducing a dichotomy between scientific discourse and ideological discourse.
Scientific discourse and ideological discourse 10:47 Because the fact that he's going to base himself on a factual scientific appearance—and there are photos showing an offshore rig, when it's actually a composite image, we're at the movies too, I mean, we're in communication—means that nine-tenths of discussions about the environment, about ecology, whether you're for or against, whether it's climate skeptics or, on the contrary, the dominant collapsological view, in both cases, the arguments are scientific in nature.
11:22 Yes, yes, but you're not taking into account the solar energy, which was more significant than the human dimension, you see, for instance. For me, as soon as we're in a discussion with scientifically-referenced arguments, we're trapped in ideology. Do you see the paradox? Whereas science and ideology are precisely mutually exclusive—either you're in scientific truth, or you're in ideological delusion. But no, I mean, let's not forget there were great Nazi biologists who were sincerely convinced that Jews were a biological threat, like the so-called inferior races, moreover, to the German nation.
12:02 So the finest minds and the greatest cultures—because this guy radiates intelligence—are clearly not immune to ideological blindness. There, I'd like to listen to him, so I won't dwell on it, but I'm warning right away that this will come back often, this dichotomy between the scientific and the ideological, and that as long as we're in the factual as he seems to be—I haven't seen him for a moment, so far, take any distance from the ecological sentiment—and I'm not saying the truths, the analyses, there are real harms—with the ecological sentiment, in short, with the symbolic order and the unconscious, not for a second, we're immediately in the factual.
12:40 Now, real science—it takes forever to figure out whether 2 and 2 equal 4, that's serious, that's mathematics. No, I'm serious. In set-theoretic logic, the logical conditions required for us to have the right to write 2 plus 2 equals 4 take pages and pages. Whereas here, things a thousand times more complex—boom, we're in it immediately, straight away. That was on the field. Then we move on to commercialization, globalization, there we have a depiction of just-in-time flow chains, trade, very long and very fast supply chains.
13:12 The first image we see right after the offshore rig, which I think, well, I believe is the Atlantic, no, but I'm not sure, is a huge container terminal, a container port terminal that clearly smells of China. Well, the enemy is already there. And in the end, what do we have? The whole industrial food system is largely—well, it's agriculture, so, as I said, a consumer of fossil energy, plus, with transport to processing centers, transport, distribution center, transport, distribution center, again, each time, oil, oil everywhere, and even nuclear, cold chain, etc.
13:55 Transport again, reprocessing. Why even nuclear? Does that mean nuclear is even more dangerous than oil? If the threat is carbon, nuclear is better. At home, with electricity, fossil energy, and then, always at the end of the chain, waste, waste transport, waste treatment, fossil energy, fossil energy. In fact, there are fossil fuels everywhere, and especially oil, coal, natural gas.
14:26 And so, there are four or five fundamental things—I don't have time to go into detail, but worth saying—about fossil energy and oil. The first thing is that it's an incredibly dense, concentrated, and rich energy. So, an order of magnitude: in a tank of gas, say 40-50 liters, in joules, if you burn that gasoline, it's equivalent to four years of human labor. A person who works, an average person, at an average job, for four years, will produce as many joules as a tank of gasoline.
15:00 A barrel of oil is twelve and a half years of human labor. Here again, I mean, this really is the scientific-sounding argument. A measurement, four years, joules, etc., a unit of measurement from physics—heat is measured in joules—and yet we're not scientific at all. What is human labor? When I do three hours of piano, as a professional pianist, I'd say... So, he says average—average between what? I mean, you can already see how quickly we move from scientific to ideological vagueness.
15:36 That is, what is human labor? What is an hour of human labor? An hour of an engineer's work? An hour of a Mexican peasant's work? An hour of a Wall Street trader's work? These aren't the same energy expenditures, surely. That means that all of us, average Europeans, who consume a lot of oil indirectly to feed ourselves, heat ourselves, get around, educate ourselves, etc., we need a lot of oil. We all have the equivalent of 500 energy slaves.
16:08 500 people, imaginary, energy slaves—it's oil that provides this energy. 500 slaves each. 500, 500. Here, we're not 300 in the room, but 300 times 500 people. 500, it designates everyone, but not him. That's the first thing. It's a dense, incredibly precious energy, and we burn it very fast. Second thing: we make a lot of things with oil.
16:38 The whole thermo-industrial civilization is based on that. You can make plastic, textiles, medicines, etc. Third thing: our entire society depends on it, and it's very correlated. Oil prices are very correlated, for example, with food prices. Here you have 2001-2011, the oil price index in red and food prices in blue. And this spike here is the subprime crisis. You remember, at the time, there were food riots in 135 countries.
17:09 In 35 countries, sorry. So, these little spikes are really major geopolitical events. So, our entire society, our food, we're eating oil, essentially. We often hear it said that now, we eat garbage. Excuse me, that's the most common expression among ecologists, what you find at Franprix. We eat garbage, we eat oil. It's kind of the same thing. It's black, it's dirty, it's greasy. There, I'm in the symbolic order, that's just to give a small indication of what I call the non-scientific order, but which can be rigorously analyzed, which can be analyzed scientifically.
17:48 Another thing, the subprime crisis, sorry, the food riots, because it's quite true, his double graph showing food prices exploding when oil explodes, quite true. It's true that our economy is almost entirely oil-based, 80%, as it was coal-based before, which is even worse actually. It's fossil in both cases—you need seven times less oil, sorry, seven times less quantity of matter to produce the same amount of energy with oil than with coal.
18:22 Coal is the worst. But regarding the food riots, watch out, here again, we see how much ecology hides the political, hides what's politically decisive. The food riots result from the policies of the IMF and the World Bank, two essentially American institutions, which spread out, which arrive in Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world—I've seen this throughout my career, I've even discussed it, I even extracted money from the World Bank to produce textbooks on behalf of my employer—and they hand out manuals saying, you're living beyond your means, to the poorest countries on the planet, you will cut the civil service in half, triple the price of staple foods, abandon price controls, in short, liberalize the economy, and that's called structural adjustment plans, in coded language—they don't say we're going to starve them, they say we're going to do a SAP, a structural adjustment plan.
19:20 And at that point, if you do all that, we might lend you 2 billion at 1% and it'll get repaid. Then the IMF expert goes home, and there are 200 dead, dying of hunger in Bamako, in Cairo, etc. That's the cause of the food riots. It has nothing to do with oil. And the other thing to mention, fourth point, here you see the curve of oil discoveries throughout the century, 1930-2030, a century's worth of field discoveries.
19:53 And then in green, that's extraction, that's the production quantity. At first, we discover lots of things and then gradually we extract it, etc. And between peak discovery and peak extraction, there's always a 40-year gap. It's a kind of geological principle. So actually, we're right at the top of the peak. In red, that's demand, which keeps rising. So there's a shearing effect, a decoupling between supply and demand. And in fact, we're at the top of a production and extraction peak. That is, production is about to start declining.
20:24 So you might tell me, well, we're at the top of a peak. That means there's still half the bell curve left. Indeed, there's still a lot, a lot of oil, of proven reserves. Not even counting future discoveries. In proven reserves alone, we have enough to blow past the IPCC's two-degree limit five times over. You know, if we extract it all and burn it all, that's the 'hot house earth,' as they say, the stove planet. It's game over for the climate. What interests me is that I'm not saying what he said is false.
Industry, health, and the limits of resources 20:57 There isn't a single detail he's stated that's factually false. It's the way they're arranged, the conclusions drawn from them, and the value judgments, which are not judgments of fact. It's true that our economy is oil-based. It's true that the series of photos going from the Malian family to the American family, passing through the Egyptian, German families, etc.—I must be skipping steps—it's extraordinary because we move toward societies where life expectancy is longest and average health is best.
21:37 We always forget that, it's quite extraordinary though. That's not shown in it. You get the impression we're heading more and more toward catastrophe with this progression. All we see are chemical, industrial products, there, on the table. Yes, that's precisely why this gentleman is in good health. I watch the Tokyo Olympics. It was the explosion of American youth. They were magnificent. In Paris Match, there were articles showing the new gods, the Apollos—I'm not exaggerating, it was the truth. Mark Spitz, I believe, still holds the record for the most Olympic gold medals won by a single man.
22:14 Right? Swimming, you should have seen it. Well, meanwhile in old Europe, my friend Clouscard, whose death's tenth anniversary we celebrated the day before yesterday, would down a liter of red wine at lunch, a liter of red wine in the evening. Where am I going with this? The Mark Spitzes, American youth—and here I'm speaking well of it, for me it's progress—were fed, 50 years before everyone else, on fruit juice, dairy products, Yoplait, well, Yoplait, or the American equivalent, etc., that produces a health explosion, and all of that is industrial.
22:50 And so? You'd think this progression is hell, because, clearly, it's staged so we head toward something unbearable. There you go. I'm not settling the substance of the debate, because people might think I'm defending the oil economy against him. Oh no, no, no, for me, oil is a catastrophe. We have that in common. Right? So I'm saying it in advance, to be clear, so that afterwards no one can muddy the waters. That's precisely the nice thing about nuclear power—it means we no longer need fossil fuels.
23:20 I'm talking about nuclear power, whose waste poses a problem, nuclear power, uranium. Moreover, when it's the nuclear power that ITER is working on in the south of France for the whole world, that is to say when it will be hydrogen that is the fuel, that is to say the product. There's nothing but that in the universe, and 80% of the universe is hydrogen, 90%. So, we won't risk being in a limited world, because the drama of fossil fuels, firstly, is that they aren't in limited quantity, even if, as he saw very well, that's interesting, it's also a small semantic detail I'm noting, excuse me, an ideological effect.
23:52 It's funny because usually the environmentalists insist on the limited side of resources. You know this theme well, the limited side of resources. And it's true that fossil resources aren't in unlimited quantity. Except that if you switch to something else, if you switch to nuclear, you can no longer talk about collapse. There's no more oil, so everything collapses. So he says, actually, there's much more than we think.
24:24 You heard what we just heard. Right? There are enough reserves left for us to reach 50 degrees, I don't know, 80 degrees. There you go. I allow myself to insist on the points that are never developed and that are the logical consequences of what we hear in the dominant discourse. I'm not saying it's true, it's false. We have to take responsibility for the consequences. So there's still a lot of oil. The question of peak oil is that we won't be able to extract it for thermodynamic reasons, because it costs energy to go extract further and deeper, with more engineers, more technology, etc.
25:00 And also for reasons—this is called EROI, Energy Return on Energy Invested, the return on investment, actually the energy return rate. In the beginning it was very easy. Here again, I'm analyzing the semantics. I don't know. This is about the tenth time he's used an Anglo-Saxon, linguistic reference, that doesn't bother me. But at the same time, he doesn't take it from scientific discourse, he takes it from management and consulting discourse.
25:34 to get oil out, extract it, engineers were called in, machines. For one barrel spent on extraction, for the industry, 100 came out in the United States. So 99 surplus barrels to develop civilization. Very easy. 90 years later, the ratio is 1 to 35. You have to dig one spent barrel, you only get 35 back. And in fact this energy return rate is decreasing in a more than proportional way.
Production is not the religion of capitalism 26:05 Today, in the United States, we're at 1 to 12. It becomes dangerous below 1 to 20 for a society. Worldwide, we're at about 1 to 20. Well, the figures are... it's a range. So it's becoming difficult energetically to go extract. Personally, this has nothing to do with it, but I find it hard to contradict him because he's charming and likeable. And the problem is that there's a thermodynamic problem and a financial problem. That is, our society needs finance, investments, a debt system, etc., to maintain this extraction capacity.
26:40 And conversely, it needs this power, this power of oil, to make the whole growth system run, this debt system. As soon as there's no more growth, the whole financial system collapses like a house of cards. And growth is directly proportional and it's the fuel we put into the system. Well, now this is where it gets serious, because here, factually, it's wrong. Let me explain. The theorem of several growths, well, growth is said to be vital in mainstream economics and therefore in the dominant discourse and ideology, as he sees it.
27:14 Growth is the fundamental value. And not only is that false, it's a misinterpretation. What I mean is that it's been more than a generation since capitalism stopped having production as its absolute value. On the contrary, capitalism, for more than a generation, has been financial and no longer industrial. What I mean is that there's a convergence—this is serious what I'm saying, I insist—there's a convergence between the appearance of mass unemployment starting from the end of the 60s, well, the end of the '60s.
27:52 The reappearance of mass unemployment, which had disappeared since the great crisis of the 1930s—look how we arrive at today's era. That is, the end of the Trente Glorieuses, which falls around the early 70s, roughly, this awakening of mass unemployment which, up to today, you see, even people on the left like Mitterrand said 'against unemployment we've tried everything.' You see, the powerlessness, and it hasn't gotten better now, it's even worse now than in Mitterrand's time. Right? I'm talking about something serious.
28:23 You might say, what's the connection? I'm getting there. It's that at the moment industry, capitalism, lays off—that is, exits from employment, so tends to stop producing, decreases production. Look, as we rightly complain in France that we've been deindustrializing for 40 years—there are far more jobs in the tertiary sector, among executives, even quaternary, that was the name of the company that employed me as a consultant.
28:54 Quaternaire Développement, that's what it was called. Why not quinary, senary. Well. Primary, agriculture, secondary, industry, tertiary, everything beyond that. You, me. The middle strata, as Clouscard would say. All that is precisely not the economy of production. Production, now, as we say, the workshop of the world is China. There, yes. There's an explosion, industry, like India, like what's called the emerging countries.
29:26 There, yes. What am I saying here? I'm doing geopolitics. You wouldn't think so, but that's what it is. I'm recalling that if he's right, the enemies are China, Russia and India. Think about it! That is, those who keep on producing dirty. Hands dirty in the grease, industry. Steinbeck. Do you understand what I mean? Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath.
30:01 So, there you go. Now, the current industry, the current economy, tends more and more not to create wealth from industrial production. Imagine today covering France with a railway network like was done under Napoleon III. Nobody thinks about that. Making an equivalent. There are enough railway lines already. Nobody thinks about it. There are fewer railway lines in France now than there were under Napoleon III. In Dieulefit, there was a little railway from Montélimar to Dieulefit called the Picodon, after the goat cheese. Dieulefit.
30:34 Nobody thinks about it anymore. So this consists less of creating new wealth, and that explains a lot of things that are going wrong and the gradual impoverishment of our societies, than the transfer of wealth from here to wealth over there. That's what the financial is. Look how the big bosses of the hardest industries—I'm thinking of Dassault, military aviation. Dassault's dream was to buy TF1.
31:05 To retrain into communications, into TV channels. And there he ran into Lagardère, who was the boss of Hachette, who also wanted TF1. Remember the battle on the ground. Lagardère was missiles and cars. Dassault was planes. And what are they fighting over? TF1. We're no longer in industry. We're no longer in the dirty stuff. We're among ourselves, we're clean. We're like him, we're fine. He has a bit of a Perceval le Gallois side to him that I rather like. I find it hard to get through to him.
31:35 Besides, individually, he's far better than the representative of the ideology he defends—let's say of the strategy he defends, no doubt, much more unconsciously than consciously most of the time. And so I find it hard because he's intelligent and likeable and I really like the way he speaks. But there you go, I want to point out that it's false to say that production is the religion of capitalism. No. So, I'll finish. This is the most important part.
32:05 There's an objective convergence between capital's design, which is to reduce hiring in order to create unemployment—so mass unemployment, and that's not getting better according to the predictions—and the ecological discourse that says we're producing too much. A troubling convergence. In fact, this energy-finance conveyor belt is the conveyor belt of our thermo-industrial civilization. And these two pillars are very fragile and are interconnected.
Sand and the electric car: industry or its capitalist management 32:35 If one of them collapses, the other collapses too. And a fifth or sixth thing, on top of oil and other minerals, about the limits of our world, is that it's not just oil. There are also plenty of minerals, rare earths, etc.—lithium, silver, palladium, zinc—that we need to make all these objects of our civilization. And at the current rate of extraction, only a few years' worth remain of all these minerals that also keep our whole civilization running.
33:05 So it's not just the energy problem, there's the problem of rare earths, minerals and materials. A small example: to reach the power of fossil fuels, building solar farms and wind turbines to replace it will require the production of 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminum, 50 times more iron, copper and glass. As for concrete, you know we currently have a sand shortage. We're soon going to run out of sand to make concrete worldwide.
33:35 There will soon be no more sand. Do we just take that in stride? I'm not stupid, I've also seen alarming documentaries showing coastlines where there were beautiful beaches at least in photos 50 years ago and now all the sand has been removed, and that's true, done by real gangsters of real-estate development who, in order to make concrete, take the sand from where it's closest, from the beaches that are right there. Between the deserts of the Sahara and Australia, let's not pretend we're short of sand.
34:09 It would cost much more to go get it where it's abundant. So instead of denouncing rapacious capitalism, which takes from where it's closest and cheapest, he denounces industry in general, which consumes sand. It's always the same misinterpretation. A fusion between industrial exploitation in general—that's the discourse we hear—and the capitalist management of industry, which is never specified. And adding, which isn't the only one by far—because there are those who say 'but I'm against this kind of management,' against capitalist management, but implying, going back—I'm not saying to the oil lamp, that's still, though he wouldn't like it, to candles, that's a caricature, I'm saying environmentalists don't say that, but I mean you could very well defend an extremely high-performing industry, that is, with as many planes and even more, and going even faster and further, and non-polluting car transport—we have the technological means to do it, I'm the first to say so—and so he's right to criticize oil-based energy, I'll just add
35:19 one dimension: the United States, being the world's leading producer of oil—when I was 15 that was the case—were also the leading exploiters of oil in the world outside the United States: at home in Saudi Arabia, at home in Iran, the Iran of the Shah at the time. So the two biggest producers—only Russia belonged to itself among all the big oil producers. Nigeria belonged to the British; Saudi Arabia and Iran belonged, so to speak, to the Americans. So the Americans had the largest exploitation on their own territory and the largest exploitation in the world besides. And all that flowed to Shell, what's called the Seven Sisters: Texaco, Shell, Exxon, Esso at the time, Standard Oil of New Jersey, etc. So it was so foundational—and here he's right, 90%, everything would collapse without oil—that they, to humanity's detriment, delayed what was perfectly viable, nuclear energy, at the time. I'll give an example that's never brought up, that's forgotten: the first car to break 100 km/h—do you know it?
36:29 it had a nickname—it's a French car, at the time France was at the forefront of the automobile, ahead of England, along with Germany a bit, and ahead of the United States. It was called 'La Jamais Contente.' Look it up on Google Images, it's extraordinary, it looks like a pointed cigar, like a rocket for the time, it's a real racer, so to speak. A 100% electric car. I'm talking about the 1920s-1930s. The electric car was fully developed, right?
37:00 The first car to break 100 km/h was an electric car, much cleaner than all the cars we've seen since. But it was shelved in the interest of the big oil companies, and that's not an inevitability of industry but an inevitability of capitalist, and in particular Western, management of industry. For a 50% probability of managing to keep global warming below 2 degrees—you know that's what came out of the IPCC report, they're talking about 3 degrees now, it's almost hopeless for the 2-degree target—we'd need to have built, by 2028, so in 10 years, 40 times more wind turbines, and wind turbines need silver, the mineral silver, plenty of rare earths, really a lot of materials and a lot of energy to build them; 26 times more photovoltaic solar panels; 15 times more kilometers of algae greenhouses—these are figures that show that developing renewable energies on an industrial and massive scale is no small thing, it requires oil, minerals, etc.
Collapse, Malthusianism, and nostalgia for the closed world 38:04 and a whole industrial and financial power against classic fossil energies—classic in the sense, not defensible, the most widespread energies—against alternative, renewable, wind and so on energies. Now, that's one issue; I'd like to know what his solution is going to be, unless there isn't one. So there, collapse is avoidable, so we have an observation on one hand: all our food systems, what we eat here in Europe, in industrialized countries, depend on oil, and soon there will be less of it or less easy access to it. It took me years to work out this equation, which is actually quite simple but we don't want to see it; in any case I never saw it made explicit like this in a course: it's simply the end of our industrial food systems coming soon, in the years ahead, we're going to live through it, it's not our future generations, it's us. That was my conclusion, my intuition, and that of many other agronomists, and there you go, expert reports etc., for 2013, for the report, and there you go.
39:16 what do we do with that, what do we build if it collapses, we have to build and go look at nuclear plants, what can emerge, the young shoots of what emerges following the collapse of this giant tree that is the industrial food system—will we be able to manage to feed ourselves in Europe by the end of our lives, in 10 years, in 15 years? That's the question. So my friend Raphaël Stevens, who lives in Brussels, and I became passionate about this question of collapse—I discovered it, as it were, through a transdisciplinary analysis of the scientific literature, this question of collapse via food systems, so we dug into the question of collapse, which resulted in this book published in 2015, and here we're broadening it much further. So what does that give us? We used the car metaphor, we're going to go even further into this question of collapse. The car—we often hear 'our civilization, our society is heading straight into a wall.' Actually that's a bad metaphor, there is no wall, but there are 5 major problems we identified. The first is that everything is accelerating, our foot is glued to the floor on the accelerator.
40:26 we can't take it off, our car is accelerating, it needs to accelerate to maintain the debt system, the financial system, and by accelerating, by consuming more and more—you have on the left all the indicators of our society: water consumption, population, GDP etc., everything's going exponential, and on the right is the Earth system's reaction: CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, methane, here, the number, ozone, biodiversity, the number of floods, etc.
40:57 the Earth system responds to our power, to our excess—I'm alluding to the fact that this is multiplying, that it's not normal, tornadoes—that's it, I believe, that's what I understood, and that it's linked to our industrial activity. 1931 flood in Pakistan, 1.5 million dead. Can you imagine now if we learned there were 1.5 million dead, we'd say that's truly the apocalypse—except it's not even in the future, it already started. Nobody cared back then, there wasn't the circulation of information like now, what happens in Pakistan is their business, and besides we're used to it there, and besides they're too many, so 1 million fewer deaths will do them good, after all, 1 million fewer mouths to feed—the Malthusianism that's often inherent in ecology, we're too many. I'll open a parenthesis to say that there's always been a Cain for whom Abel is one too many since the origin of humanity, that has nothing to do with the modern world, and my main metaphor here, borrowed from zoology, is the fact that wild dogs, a species I quite like, terrifying because even the elephant...
42:07 the lion, everyone backs away from wild dogs, magnificently organized in packs in the African savanna. Wild dogs, when they're twins in the mother's womb—rather not twins, they're often several in the mother's womb, carried, as they say—the eldest, well, the one born a few seconds before the others, I mean, kills the younger one in the mother's womb already. It's not the eye that was behind the tomb watching Cain, but Cain was already in the womb killing Abel, you see, there's always the ghost of the other who is one too many, as we're going to say 'we're too many.' This is very important what I'm saying, it's the sledgehammer argument of many environmentalists' ideas, that resources are limited, the peak—he mentions peak, peak oil—are limited, so if we're too many, they're even more limited, and that's the old ghost of economies not of modernity but of scarcity, precisely because in Africa—I've experienced this in Africa—there's always jealousy and aggressiveness toward the one whose business is doing well, because there isn't enough for everyone, so we were raised that way in frugal, traditional societies, you all have grandmothers...
43:17 maybe not so much your generation, I don't know, I'm asking you, but for me, they used to say, 'eat some bread' when we ate at the table, because there isn't enough for everyone of the meat, of everything precious, so I'll eat bread to balance it out, there you go. And in Vietnam we only ate rice with a little touch of nuoc-mâm, a bit, a little sauce, protein was wealth. The more scarcity there is, the poorer we are, the more the problem of 'we're too many' arises, it's an archaic problem—I'll just finish on this point—Marx makes fun of a phony union leader who had played the role of management at the time, I'm trying to recall the name, who said about wage increases, 'it's not by increasing the size of the spoons that everyone will get more soup'—I've heard the soup tureen has a limit, yes, the problem, as with today, Marx said, the limit given to it by today's production, meaning we assume the size of the soup tureen is invariable, it's really extraordinary that we've already given up on growth. So, one, we have entered the geological epoch of the Anthropocene.
44:27 so we've left the Holocene, remember from your classes, 10-12,000 years of extraordinary climate stability where temperature varied by less than 1 degree, which allowed the emergence, among other things, of agriculture, of settlement, of societies, of civilizations. There, we've left that epoch, we're accelerating, the Anthropocene is the epoch of the human being, where the human being has become—or rather certain human beings, not all—have become a major geological force capable of destabilizing the planet's great biogeochemical cycles, and so, small social temptation—not all—this would have been an opportunity to explore, to dig a bit—there, they suddenly realize it's not the Anthropocene that's in danger, it's the rapacity of some within the anthropological sphere. I was saying the Earth system responds, we've seen it: climate change, destruction of animal habitats, of plants, of arable land, etc., catastrophe, we've seen it, they show that poor little ones—you saw there the dead fish, we see the Sahel, which I know well.
45:37 toward the drought, the 1973 drought in the Sahel, the people there talk about it like our elders talk about Verdun and the war of '14, 80% of the livestock disappeared, for instance for herders who moved 300 km south to become guards or whatever in the cities, Vigeon [sic], so that's serious but paradoxical, that is to say, in the least industrialized regions of the world, well, the lack of oil and minerals we talked about at the start is what's actually happening. So the car has 5 problems, I was saying, that's the first problem, the tank is empty, or at least we're on reserve and the needle is trembling, it's almost the end, first problem. Second problem is this one: there's no wall, but we've gone off the road, we've left the marked track of the Holocene, we're in unpredictable territory, that is, the climate is responding strangely, in fact we're tumbling down the slope off to the side, in fog, foot to the floor, with obstacles coming at us that we can't manage to see. That's the situation of the car. Little quiz for those who haven't seen it.
46:47 the talk, or haven't seen the videos on YouTube, so what's your guess, what does this pink ball represent in volume—those who already know, let the others answer—I really like this slide, I can attest, no idea. Actually, it's all the air in the world, the whole world's atmosphere, it's a thin layer, a thin film around the planet, and in volume it's equivalent to just that. And here—no, it's not fresh water, it's all the water in the world, oceans included, all the world's water. It's crazy, actually fresh water, if you imagine that as an orange, that would be a little pea; fresh water is a grain of sugar. All the world's water, oceans included, is this volume here. We're arriving at what Serge Latouche calls the age of limits, the Anthropocene, we've gone all the way round, and we're on this small fragile spaceship, and the stakes of our generation lie in this extraordinary paradox: it's just as we arrive in the 20th century.
47:58 at the conquest of space, at the transgression of limits, we're even leaving Earth's gravitational pull, we're just barely starting to scratch the solar system and consider farms on Mars—that's precisely the moment we say we're limited. It's really extraordinary. In epistemology works, for reference, for instance a man like Alexandre Koyré, who wrote admirable Galilean studies, a specialist in the emergence of physics—one of his most famous titles is 'From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe.' What's characteristic of what we now know scientifically is that the universe isn't closed, that it isn't limited, unlike Ptolemy's, the one before the revolution between...
48:41 the heliocentric revolution, excuse me, relative to geo- and anthropocentric forcing precisely—is that the world isn't closed, that it's infinite, which wrenches even from Pascal that anguished sentence: 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.' It was so much more reassuring, the world of before, where we were at the center, with nested domes, and if we saw stars, it was through little holes, like a sieve, we saw the empyrean, the divine light behind, beyond these domes—it's better, after all, to inhabit the center of the world. So that means—and I'm serious—that means, and it's been said, Freud said it, there are narcissistic wounds punctuating human history. The Copernican revolution was one of the first collective narcissistic wounds. The discovery of the unconscious later too, of course; for Marx, the Marxian current of class struggle, even more so—but I'll say, well, these are narcissistic wounds we never recover from, and I believe that this discourse, completely unconsciously, in all good faith, echoes an attempt to patch up
Lock-ins, complexity, and the Club of Rome 49:52 this wound, to return to the maternal womb, that is, to the closed world, to take care and avoid the damage. So it's badly off track, granted, but there's still a way to do plenty of things—all the world's water, and in fact the third—where am I—acceleration, empty tank, off the road, fourth problem: the steering wheel is locked. There are lock-ins everywhere in society, systemic, sociotechnical, excuse me, I repeat—what I like about him is that most of those who hold this discourse are frightening but also frightened, they have a sort of convulsive side, you can immediately see the neurotic in them, whereas he is marvelously balanced, he says it with a smile, it's the catastrophe, it's the collapse, and he looks like he's saying 'come to my party tonight.' Institutional, monetary, individual, cognitive lock-ins, etc., there's a lot of lock-in, that is, to sum up, we engineers who are being trained today spend our time solving problems that our ancestors, previous generations, created.
51:02 at some point certain people chose the internal combustion engine to develop civilization, and now we spend our time solving that problem, which is what sociologists call path dependence, that is, we're caught in a rut and every time we have to improve the situation, but that depends on technical choices—the 'French delay,' you know this, the 'French delay' is an old argument, 80 years old, meaning that every time, what happens here is what was already done in the United States first, right, and we find it with a delay, a gap, well, true, so every time there's a new and decisive concept, it's borrowed from what's already been discovered in the United States, in fact we're following the previous movement, that's a sociotechnical system, and the sociotechnical system is gigantic, globalized, hyper, and the bigger it is, the more locked in it is, and we really struggle to get out of this rut, to turn the wheel, to begin a transition toward another society, another civilization, etc.
52:00 and the bigger it is, the more locked in it is, the more there are, you see, political, cognitive locks etc., the more difficult it is—that's a major issue, and I invite you to go look, if you want to see scientific publications or dig into the subject for a thesis, it's fascinating, the term is 'lock-in,' lock-in in English, sociotechnical lock-ins. I know Olivier De Schutter, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, who's a jurist, works on this, and it's really one of the keys to the transition, managing to unlock the systems in order to make this turn happen. And the fifth problem is that the car's interior is extremely fragile. So why so vulnerable—we're tumbling down the slope and in fact our car is very fragile—why?
52:48 because everything is interconnected. Here's just a graphic that was made at Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and every year everyone is asked to estimate, to quantify, planetary risks; in fact all the risks are linked to one another. That comes from Davos, as if Davos were a place where humanity's knowledge is being increased—it's really incredible, it's a place where they work hard to figure out how to maintain their domination, it's not a place where truths are told, it's a place where they work out what the propaganda of the coming days will be so that the masses keep doing what they're told. But the point is just that our world is very complex, too complex, and in this increase of complexity, the share of unpredictability, of irreversibility, of complexity—as Edgar Morin would say—becomes problematic. I was raised on this, because I did my thesis at Prigogine's lab—the former, well, he's dead already, but I say former because he's dead—Nobel Prize in Chemistry
53:58 who highlighted the laws of chaos, of irreversibility, self-organization, etc., so I was steeped in that, but I increasingly notice that, yes, this is becoming clear, a bit more historically—he was steeped in it, Prigogine, Edgar Morin—what's convergent in all this? MIT, you've heard of it, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first ones, as early as the late 1950s—that goes back a long way—they start talking about the first notion that will become common in mass ecology, because there's first an ecology of very high-standard-of-living countries, California, Scandinavian countries, and now it's the whole world, but it was the notion of 'quality of life,' it began with the concerns of Prigogine and others, Edgar Morin, the complexity of chaos etc., that's the great scholar—careful, well, not Edgar Morin, who's a grocer, there you go—but Prigogine, these are great scholars, again, one can be an immense scholar with a very fine mind, even sometimes vast culture, and not be immune to ideological blindness, but we'll come back to that later, it interests me, the biologists.
55:08 They're not very well trained in complexity, and that's still a problem even within the world of science, let alone outside science, so the invitation is to go and understand these dynamics. We're dealing with complex adaptive systems—society, ecosystems, and so on—that react in strange, counterintuitive ways. For example, when you have heterogeneous networks like this with few links—counterintuitive is a typical term from journalistic communication language, it's a consulting way of speaking, you could say "it's not obvious," but instead you say "counterintuitive," as if that made it more technical, so more true—when you put a constraint on them, they degrade gradually. Whereas hyper-connected, hyper-homogeneous networks like our society, our globalized finance, our economy, hold up well, they're fairly resilient at first under stress, but that actually hides a fragility we don't see, and these hyper-connected systems react in a much more brutal way. So at first we have a capacity for adaptation, and then in the regimes...
56:19 hyper-connected regimes, there's resistance to change, and at a certain point you get what are called critical transitions, catastrophic shifts—you can look at the publications, and we're typically in that case: we don't see collapses coming, systems hold on longer than we think and collapse faster than expected. So we're heading toward domino effects, and when there's a major rupture across all these interconnected systems—finance, economy, electricity, transport, all of it is connected—it can produce domino effects, cascading effects that cripple an entire society. I invite you to read this novel I just read, which is rather badly written but gripping—not the form, but the content is interesting—because the pitch, I won't spoil it, but it's a blackout in Europe lasting several days, up to 10 days—yes, there's a baby boom—and it's incredibly well documented technically. It really hits you, it's something else compared to scientific reports, but there's plenty...
57:29 to feed collapsologists in the making. So, the car: we have the foot stuck on the accelerator, the tank is empty, we're heading off the road, the steering wheel is locked, and the cabin is very fragile. That's the state of things. As I was saying, we'd need to dig into this complexity, this systemic side of the problems, which is rarely addressed in the media or in science, and so that's what we've done through our transdisciplinary approach—a typical example of systems thinking, which starts to verge on quiet megalomania—it's not megalomania, it means the world of science plus the world of science journalism haven't reached the level of knowledge and lucidity that I have. It's really extraordinary, I wouldn't dare claim a thousandth of that certainty, I'm above it, and above the scientific community I claim to belong to de facto because I'm an engineer, even though he must be, he must be 300 years behind the cutting edge of physics all the same, unlike a guy like Barrau, who's much more excitable but who really is at the cutting edge, undeniably, he's a researcher, but who is...
58:40 much less intelligent than him, and me, the media and the scientific world, I'm beyond it, along with a small handful of friends of mine. It's really extraordinary, I mean it really goes over. It's the Club of Rome model, 1972 model, the Meadows report, the Club of Rome, the Meadows report, that's the consequence—sorry, I'm playing professor but you should know this—but these are the first organizations that bring out the first organized, institutional consequences of the rupture I'm talking about, from the late 1950s, initiated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which basically said—they have a system, the world system, the world model—so this is the world simplified, obviously, modeled with positive and negative feedback loops everywhere, this is systems dynamics, it's a discipline called systems dynamics, and they modeled the world. It's a discipline called systems dynamics, and that's how a science gets launched.
59:51 It's really extraordinary, these bogus disciplines. And at the time, it was the early days of computers, at MIT they put in the real figures—population, industrial investment, birth rates, all that—they put in food production, they put everything in, they pressed Enter, and they saw how the world, as modeled there, would evolve. It's the dynamics of the system that's studied, observed. That's what was called at the time futurology, specialists in forecasting, also called prospectivists. In 1835 there were already their counterparts in London—it was the industrial cutting edge of the time—futurologists who said that within a generation you wouldn't be able to move around London anymore, so by the 1980s, because of the height, the number of meters of horse manure generated by carriages, the air would become unbreathable. They never thought that horse-drawn carriages would disappear because of the automobile. Nothing fails like futurology. Futurology is the weight of ideology on science.
1:01:01 That is to say, you have to use a scientific metaphor, the derivative: there's a curve, and futurology is what takes the constraints of the present—that part is true—and imagines them continuing like that into the future, as if it would last that way, so it's exactly the tangent, as if the curve didn't exist, whereas there was going to be a radical change. So you extrapolate—this is exactly what Marx calls Robinsonades—things that were supposed to evolve like that for 150 years. So by pressing Enter, these are the real figures, 1900-1972, they collected the world's real figures, well, real, that is—so there's world population starting its exponential curve there, in gray; food production there, we have the green revolution there, in green; and in pink, it's the economy, services and industry. As a result pollution here also starts its exponential curve, and there it's the nonrenewable resources starting to run out. So those are the real data, and they press Enter, and the model produces its dotted lines—well, some things go down, that's true, that's the resources...
1:02:11 and the things that explode, that's population, according to what he says. Now you know very well, we all know it but we forget it as soon as we're in this kind of discourse—he knows it too—that far more children are born in poor countries than in countries with a high standard of living. So if you want to avoid a demographic apocalypse, raise the standard of living—so let's go the opposite way from degrowth. What does the model say, roughly? If we keep on this trajectory of exponential growth, we're heading toward a collapse of all the indicators, and thus of society, in the first half of the 21st century. We're here, roughly—I've been saying this for two or three years, so maybe we need to shift it a bit. So there we have it, with a beginning: collapse of the economy, of food production, with a slight inertia for world population, which according to the model starts declining in 2030, and then greater inertia for pollution.
1:03:21 which declines with 20 or 30 years of inertia. And then an Australian said, well, it's been 40 years since we had this model, is it robust? It is robust, the real data fits quite well—so he collected, there, the real data, and it fits the model fairly well. And, for the anecdote, though I don't have time to develop it here, the Meadowses ran lots of scenarios with lots of solutions—efficient energy technologies, birth control, doubling food production—they doubled the figures, pressed Enter, and every time there's a collapse, except in one case: when they put all the solutions together. And if you start too late, in the 70s or 80s, it collapses; but if you put all the solutions together, they managed to stabilize the curves in what we might call, I don't know, a sustainable economy. Sustainable meaning what else?
1:04:17 What's the definition of "sustainable," really? One that doesn't collapse, that's all. All the scenarios collapse, and business as usual, where no solution is put in place, is the most realistic one, the one that fits the real data best—this is a 2012 update. So this isn't a prediction of the future, it's testing a model, a model dynamic, because there's a big absentee here, as you've seen—actually several. There are no unforeseeable positive or negative events; there's no major transition where everyone manages to pull off a nice transition, à la Rob Hopkins; there's no major geopolitical conflict, a nuclear war, etc.; and there's no climate factor—and yet that's clearly a major destabilizing factor. So in complex systems—this is for the students, I really think it's important to grasp this—there's something important to understand: when we're dealing with complex adaptive systems that evolve, we're dealing with threshold effects, contagion effects, and hysteresis effects. Threshold means...
Thresholds, warning signs, and the authority of the IPCC 1:05:27 that at some point everything tips over; contagion means cascading effects that are hard to predict; and hysteresis means the way out is different from the way back—for example, when a forest burns, you have to go back through germination and many other stages to get a forest back, you can't go backward, the fire is irreversible. And then there's a fascinating field about early warning signals—let me develop this a little. When you have a variable, say the CO2 level in the atmosphere, and you make the complex system move, at some point it's stable, as we saw earlier, and at some point it collapses—there's a zone, a threshold, actually it's the edge of the road in our car metaphor: if you go off the edge of the road, at some point everything tips over rapidly, uncontrollably, irreversibly. That's a nice way to picture the resilience of a system, a system's capacity to recover from shocks. Take a system, it's the ball, you give it a shock—bang—if the valley it's in, in a thermodynamic representation, is deep enough, the system is stable; in physics that's called stable equilibrium; on top of a bump...
1:06:37 that's unstable equilibrium—bang, one small knock and it rolls down; here, no, one small knock and it comes back—that's resilience. Except that when the environment degrades, at some point the valley isn't so stable anymore, isn't so deep anymore, and you give it a small knock and—bam—the ball moves into another stationary state, which is very unpleasant for human beings, let's say, or for ecosystems, or whatever. And actually there's a sort of—well, the ball gets attracted to that state, you can no longer hold it back, and it's especially these thresholds that must not be crossed. And currently we're at the limit, the ball is in the process of crossing that threshold, even at the global level. You've perhaps seen—ah yes, I hadn't said that—what's fascinating is that scientists are currently studying and listening to the noise of systems that are going to collapse, and there are lots of variables—well, we can skip the terminology—that show the noise of a stable system, and at some point, when it's about to tip over the threshold, it emits noises, early warning signals, that indicate the system is going to collapse. And currently scientists...
1:07:47 in many fields are studying this, it's fascinating, and we're starting to detect these signs at the global level—for example, the melting of the ice caps, the thermohaline circulation, the ocean circulation, the Gulf Stream, and so on. It's very interesting, this shift, again from a symbolic point of view, the multiplication—the notion of signs—suddenly it's exactly the warning signs of the apocalypse in scripture: when the time is ripe for the apocalypse, signs multiply, their presence is already manifest—in short, it's coming soon. Strange signals have been detected hundreds of thousands of years before a collapse, and now it's starting, and likewise at the level of the biosphere—the big 2012 study, you remember Barnosky, the one who was interviewed first, who was interviewed in the film Tomorrow, who says it might be the end of the human species—that's him, he's one of the stars of Collapso, he says it with a radiant smile, it's funny actually, a little puzzle I haven't solved. And in fact there were about twenty of them who did this study, they show there's a degradation, that's the small dark slice of the pie chart...
1:08:57 of the biosphere, it's degrading, and at some point there's a threshold—I think it was 53%, I don't remember exactly—bang, it tips over, and it won't degrade in a linear fashion, it will tip toward total degradation. The ball plunges into another valley, and the biosphere will become uninhabitable for most species on Earth. There's a trigger, a tipping effect, coming soon—that's why it made waves, and journalists ran headlines saying "the end of the world is coming soon." And actually, this was 2012—this summer, on August 6th, they published a study that made waves, maybe you heard about it, on the hothouse planet, hot house earth, and actually it's brand new, fresh off the press, it really was a moral blow. And yes, it's still possible, and it's Earth—you see the same thermodynamic representation—for hundreds of thousands of years it oscillated between glacial and interglacial periods, it was in a sort of very stable equilibrium, the Holocene, that's 10,000 years here, where there weren't many changes, the ball didn't move on, it stayed there. And in fact now we've degraded our environment to the point where Earth won't go back that way anymore, it's going to go...
1:10:07 The Holocene is the Garden of Eden from which we've come out with the Anthropocene, and the return is irreversible since there's the angel with the flaming sword guarding it—what religious backdrop is this? I'll say, 90% of living species disappeared 200 million years ago, well before humans arrived on the planet, because of volcanic vapors coming from Siberia. All of us, the mosquitoes, us, the amoebas, we're the descendants of the 10% that remain, through another corridor that leads fairly quickly to a hothouse planet, uninhabitable. Uninhabitable, why?
1:10:43 Because they actually identified about fifteen major positive feedback loops—like permafrost: if the permafrost melts, there are fewer and fewer... they've shown, well, more—it releases methane and things spiral out of control, and everything spirals, snowball effects, and there are 15 major ones worldwide. Some are triggered easily, some are triggered with more difficulty, and some only trigger at plus 5 degrees, or with great difficulty. Plus 5 degrees global average temperature, that's the problem—and that's the heart of the study—the two or three that trigger easily set off the medium ones, which set off the severe ones, and that's why the slope is so slippery: if you trigger the first ones, which trigger at plus 1, plus 3 degrees average—and there the IPCC, optimistic as it is, says plus 3—currently that's the 36th time he's referred to the IPCC, he should listen to Gervais, that's a good antidote, I mean, to what's being developed here. Gervais was recruited by the IPCC as an evaluator.
1:11:53 As an evaluator, right, a climatologist recruited by the IPCC among the evaluation teams—so really, like an inspector for the Ministry of Education, it's about as high as it gets, he's the most qualified guy. So Gervais is now classified among climate skeptics—he says, "I was fired by my employer because I had obeyed, I evaluated, I was asked to." He says, he's a defender of carbon, he says, "but carbon is a blessing, the more carbon there is, the more greenery there is, plants feed on it, carbon is good"—carbon, first of all. And he says the IPCC—let's not forget it's not an assembly of scientists, there are plenty of scholars in it, undeniable competence by the way, it's not for me to judge that—but the decision is political within the IPCC, the final report is decided by politicians, there have been scandals, it's well known—oh, sorry, we forgot a zero, I mean, we could do the whole history of the IPCC—but he talks about it as something beyond question. People criticize the UN nowadays, but they glorify the IPCC. You know, the United States criticizes the UN...
1:13:03 because the UN kept them from going into Iraq—it's funny, anything remotely international gets discredited, the beast gets to have free rein—but the IPCC is beyond any discussion, it's really extraordinary. That triggers the others, the plus 4, plus 5, and it triggers—so, right—and so scientists say, it's as if we're on a cascade, we're here, the current, we're in a canoe, the current is speeding up, we're here, uh-oh, we need to paddle backward, we can't anymore, it's too fast, and some people can see the void a hundred meters ahead, quick, we need to swim, we can't paddle backward, it's not possible, the current is too fast, today we've crossed thresholds, quick, we need to get to the riverbank, it's too fast, the current is too fast. And in this study, they say there's a tiny little rock on the left, we can still cling to it, it's here—they calculate that if we're all coordinated, if we go all-in, we can get through a transition, but in a few years, something crazy, like a wartime economy, we all go for it full tilt, we can still cling to the little rock—the Soviet Union...
War economy, unpopular measures, and predicament 1:14:15 the stages that every historian knows: the October Revolution, then the civil war, then war communism, the five-year plans besieged by Westerners who landed from every side to put an end to the revolution—they proposed a war economy to get out of it. I just heard that expression—it's really extraordinary—for the benefit of capitalism this time, I'll come back to this: it's exactly the discourse that today's powerful people in this world need. The big stakes are as long as they fear having to hand power over to others, but you have to be coordinated and go all-in—that's the discourse shared with Barrau. Barrau said governments need to take unpopular measures—it's quite terrifying what we're hearing through this discourse. That means everything politicians can't manage to push through—I'm speaking like an employers' association—pensions, that's one thing, I mean, pay raises, the standard of living, being able to hire someone and fire them as you please without 3,000 pages of labor law, all that...
1:15:25 we're going to be able to do it as an "unpopular measure"—I mean, under the banner of ecology, you can push through everything you couldn't push through with economic, financial, political arguments, etc. And it's their double—and even then it's not certain we'll manage—and even if we hang on, we stabilize at over 2 degrees, which is absolutely catastrophic, I remind you, we haven't experienced that in 800,000 years, human beings have never experienced that. So we'll be on the rock, and we could still get hit by an unforeseen wave, or if we keep rocking the canoe, we come loose from the rock—that's where we stand. And that's just the climate question, there are still all the other questions—oil, pollution, and so on. This is the first time I'm saying this at a conference: physical growth of our societies is going to stop—that was 2015, we were sure of that in this book. We have altered the entire Earth system irreversibly, we are heading toward an unstable, nonlinear future, we may now be potentially subject to a global systemic collapse. So, to sum up...
1:16:35 we do have a state of stupefaction, paralysis, dread, and with Raphaël we explain it like this: if we stop the engine, if we stop consuming, extracting fossil fuels—and me, I don't want to stop consuming, and my African friends even less so, they don't consume enough, what is this, a white people's thing, etc., etc.—if we stop everything, finance collapses, we trigger the collapse of our industrial society, but we might be able to try to preserve—it might preserve boundaries, thresholds, the edges of the road of the Earth system. If we keep going, we need growth, jobs, and we stay in this rut, we go all-in—he doesn't want growth, he doesn't want jobs, it's really extraordinary—then we're going to destabilize too many thresholds, and in return, bam, we'll collapse too, but in a much more serious way, because this could include the disappearance of the human species, or even of most species on Earth.
1:17:45 This second line here is much more serious, actually much more consequential, and we're stuck. What do we do? Is there still a small way out? Is there perhaps still a little rock to cling to? Some room to maneuver so we can get moving—because the goal of collapsology, or of studying these fascinating things—he's a good communicator, first you terrify people and then you offer solutions, you'll feel relieved just imagining there might be some—it's not about crushing the future, above all it's not about saying everything is doomed. Not everything is doomed. The idea is not to crush the future and say there's nothing left to do, it's to try to see how we can find the right paddle, learn to row, learn to get along well, and get through these years of storm as best we can—entering the storm as well as possible. We're not facing a problem for which we can call in engineers who will solve it and find a solution. We're no longer in the realm of solutions—I set aside that word, solution. We're in what the English call a predicament—we don't have the term...
1:18:55 in French for it—it's an inextricable situation. An incurable genetic disease isn't a problem because there's no solution; death isn't a problem because there's no solution. On the other hand, you can learn to live well with it—if you have type 1 diabetes, you give yourself insulin shots every day, you learn to live well with it, but there's no solution. And the collapse, or the storms to come, the disasters, the climate, whatever you want to call it, these are not problems to be solved, they're predicaments—that is, that's how it is, the future is like that, not everything is written. The English term "predicament" comes from religion, it's preaching, that is, the work of the priest, that is, of the preacher—it's really extraordinary, this semantic field. There's still room to maneuver, but you have to learn to live well with it, with one foot in reality, lucidity, the bad news, whatever you want, and one foot in the good news, which is also reality—but if you remove one of the two, you lose your footing. In short, if you don't listen to the priest, you'll go to hell, either through denial or through despair, nihilism, etc. You have to keep both feet firmly grounded. What are the margins...
1:20:05 for maneuver—well, this is a fairly quick overview, but it'll launch the debate. Already, stop wasting—half of the world's food production is wasted, half. Stop eating meat, we all know the arguments. Stop eating junk in general, sugar, bad fats, whatever you want—that's already a big margin for maneuver, it's not easy, but there we can achieve it at the individual and collective level. So we can reduce production and predation on ecosystems, the Earth system, etc.—the guy only has rich people's problems, it's really fantastic. That's a big political, sociotechnical, psychological question, there's a lot of research to be done on this. Actually, if you look closely at the coherence—because that's what I really value in his performance compared to other ecological discourses I've heard, beyond what I said about his character, his ease, his elocution, but that concerns—he doesn't say the presentation of the content—it's the systematicity of what he says, it's extremely coherent from all...
Nixon shock, geopolitical collapse, and the example of Cuba 1:21:15 these points of view, and the overall grasp of the problems—but as a result it's easier to spot the weak points, precisely compared to other approaches we have, which only insist on one aspect of the problem and with which you have to start over from scratch, with whom you have to start over from scratch. Let me sum up these dates: MIT, Meadows report, the 1970s, '68 marks the start of the '70s—you see the break, '68—I'm going in no particular order because we don't have time to sort everything out—it's in the 1970s that the shift from the industrial economy to the financial economy happens, that's where the click occurs, that is, all the problems we're currently paying for, up to the subprime crisis, the decoupling of gold and the dollar, the famous Nixon Shock as it's called in the media, the Nixon shock. Nixon announces in Tokyo—he was on an official visit to Japan—that the dollar is going to be the biggest bounced check of all time.
1:22:26 Until then there was the gold exchange standard—excuse me, I'm really overdoing the antithesis here—now the gold exchange standard, that is, stemming from Bretton Woods and thus from the war, a system that remained stable until the 1970s, which corresponds to what's called the Trente Glorieuses, the thirty glorious years, where there was—I'm talking exclusively about the Western world here, as opposed to the Soviet bloc, not compared to India and so on, when I say the Western world—from a political point of view, from a political point of view there was this remarkable stability, and from a monetary point of view there was permanent convertibility between gold and the dollar, at a fixed, non-fluctuating, non-moving parity. I remember it very well, because as a kid, to show off like my father who read Le Monde, I read Le Monde as if I understood everything, I'd look at the page, at the end, at the stock market pages, and every day for years it said: one ounce of gold equals 35 dollars. I'm telling you, an ounce of gold, 35 dollars, fixed parity—it seems now, I don't know, it's like...
1:23:36 the Stone Age compared to today. After that come floating exchange rates, the monetary snake, currency fluctuations, and now there are no more universal standards. The principle of the gold exchange standard is that you have a dollar, it's a check, that is, it's worthless if it's not backed by a certain quantity of gold, that was the principle. And the United States was so powerful, because everyone else had been devastated by the war, whereas not a single brick of a house, a building, a city, a state in the United States had been so much as grazed by a single bullet during the Second World War—let's not forget, they're the kings of oil, it has to be said—at the end of the war everything is destroyed except them, so they set the rules, and they do it well monetarily for the Western world, since this gold exchange standard works very well and consists of saying: you can bring your dollars to the bank, we'll give you the corresponding weight in gold. So it runs on trust, trust, I translate literally, trust, you know...
1:24:46 "In God We Trust," it's written on the dollar, it's important, that is, trust equals belief, belief in Latin is "credo," credit, and financial problems and imaginary problems—and religious ones—go hand in hand. I take up my thread again: all that collapsed with the Nixon shock, total decoupling of the dollar from gold. What does that mean? It means, you go to the Marché Saint-Pierre in Montmartre, where the big fabric markets are, you know, you buy fabric samples to make curtains for example, you unroll them, there's a meter stick, a wooden one, you've seen that at fabric merchants, there's a big wooden meter stick, imagine that's the standard, that was gold back then—imagine that instead of this meter stick being made of wood or metal, it was made of rubber, an elastic band for measuring your fabric—well, you'd never know what you're buying. We've been living in that since 1971, since the summer of '71, since the Nixon shock, we don't know what the currencies around us actually represent in real value, we don't know what grounds them, there's only nominal value.
1:25:57 So the counter-argument, what I mean is: yes, but American power, American wealth, is such that everyone trusts the dollar, there's no problem, right? Yes, that held until the subprime crisis. So he's right, there's a word he uses that I actually agree with, which is perhaps the most important word in what he says, so it's not a minor detail—it's that we're threatened, we're threatened by a collapse, but we're not thinking about the same collapse at all. He's thinking about the collapse of the cosmos, he even says animal species will disappear, you see, that of the Earth, well, fair enough—as for the others, who cares, our universe doesn't seem very densely inhabited. And yes, there's a collapse coming, an economic, monetary, social collapse, one that can trigger wars—that's much more serious in my opinion, the geopolitical urgency is, to my mind, much more serious than the ecological urgency. So the second story, for those who lived through it, the older ones among us who experienced the publication of the Club of Rome report in '72, there were also the first oil shocks—I didn't experience that myself, I was born in '78—but a whole imaginary developed around it nonetheless.
1:27:07 The first survivalists at the time were rather left-wing, far-left communities who wanted to survive a nuclear winter, and then there was also the imaginary of peak oil, etc. It's against this backdrop that permaculture was born in Australia—well, actually in Tasmania—the idea of creating agriculture that no longer depends on oil. And, if you like, we'll come back to this later, permaculture in Cuba—you know it was a Soviet ally, an island in the Caribbean, and in the 1990s there was the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and it was the island, one of the most industrialized countries in Latin America, the one with the most scientists—Che Guevara was Minister of Industry, sorry, not Agriculture, Industry—they exported massively, they imported spare parts, gasoline, diesel, all that. And in fact there was a collapse of the Soviet bloc, so a collapse of its allies, but they were also under a US embargo, so they found themselves alone on their island with no supplies—collapse. They ran a full-scale experiment in collapse, and they managed.
1:28:17 "El cubano es creativo"—I went there for two months, incredible, they're creative, there's mutual aid, it's really quite beautiful. Now, these are caricatures, but that's what I felt—it's a very complex situation, but in a few minutes we don't have time to go into it—but the government requisitioned trucks to turn into buses, there's incredible discipline around lining up, it's really quite extraordinary. It was making do, making do, because the cold chains were broken, no more electricity, no more elevators, no more refrigeration. There was banana production in the west, they didn't even have any in the east, there were no more trucks, it was hard—agriculture, that meant transportation, and agriculture that was already organic because there weren't many products left, so it was done by hand, and rather in the cities, because there was a lot of manpower there. This is in the city, I took this photo—we have an intensive production system, super intensive, except it's organic—besides, they're no longer allowed to use products in the city, it's a decree, phyto products, well, sanitary products.
1:29:27 And it's labor-intensive—urban agriculture, agroecology, permaculture, all of that exploded. Not everything, though—about half of agriculture converted, and you see intensive units of urban agricultural production, etc. They won the Alternative Nobel Prize for showing that this could be done at large scale, organically, and produce as much or more than conventional agriculture. We see this in post-industrial cities like Detroit, where community gardens have sprung up spontaneously, but in lots of cities urban agriculture is coming back in the northern hemisphere, in industrialized countries. And actually, we can also look—leaving Cuba now—at the United States during the Second World War, and the First World War too, and in England too, and even in the 1930s there were big gardening programs. During the Second World War, after Pearl Harbor, I believe it was 1941, the population wanted to contribute to the war effort, and the military said, no, no, that's a job for professionals, but you can grow vegetables...
1:30:37 go for it, everywhere, in municipalities, on lawns, all out. They called it the Victory Garden. There was a committee with military staff, major universities—Harvard, etc.—that ran this program, and within two years, by 1943, 60% of vegetables were being produced by Victory Gardens, everywhere, at major universities, in front of the Capitol—imagine that today at the Élysée, or wherever—and posters everywhere. So you see, Obama didn't invent anything. What's interesting is that the whole sequence we just heard, from Cuba to the United States, produces almost opposite systems—what do they have in common?
1:31:19 In both cases there was a little miracle—with his own values, mind you, we agree on that—that is, suddenly there was a form of production that wasn't loaded with fossil fuels, etc., ecological in today's sense—except that in Cuba it's a constraint due to the embargo, there's no choice, he puts it very well, the collapse of Soviet aid. I'll just recall, to illustrate how right he is: every year Cuba, or rather the USSR, bought up Cuba's surplus sugar production—the USSR, the world's leading sugar producer, from beets, that's all there is in Russia, I mean, poor land, no fine wheat like here, all there is is sugar—the leading production was the USSR, buying Cuba's cane sugar surplus to keep it afloat, you see. When there's no more Soviet Union, there's not much left of Cuba's economy, which was already strangled by the embargo. You know that a ship, a shipping company that made a stop in Cuba, could no longer...
1:32:29 make a stop in one of the ports of the Gulf of Mexico in the United States—it was terrible. So that's a terrible constraint on one hand, and on the other, in the United States, nothing less than the Second World War and Pearl Harbor is what produced this miracle. What they have in common is that they're offering us solutions, you see what I mean, where we're practically at war as a way out of it—that is, I see a solution where we're not at war, which is the solution for the future, for our children—that's interesting, isn't it. And everywhere, we can do things on a large scale, we can organize, we have the capacities—that's shown in history, we can move fast and far and together. Afterward it was a different climate, there was a war effort, etc., there are conditions to be brought together—so it's not an argument for war, but it's worth noting that we have the capacity to do it. Second—well, third, actually—the question of collapse, the question that often comes up: are we all going to end up killing each other? I don't know, in any case we can answer both yes and no, and in fact...
Mutual aid and the generic prematurity of man 1:33:41 we answered this question along with Gauthier Chapelle, a friend who is also a biologist, an agronomist, and a doctor specializing in small creatures, who brought biomimicry to Europe—that is, drawing inspiration from the principles of living organisms to create sustainable, or rather resilient, systems. That's biomimicry. And we surveyed all living beings, how living beings—fungi, bacteria, plants, animals, humans—associate with each other, and there's a whole biodiversity of mutual aid, a "symbiodiversity"—mutual aid is everywhere, since the dawn of time, in every species. Put a population of starfish in with a population of oysters or mussels, within a week there's not a single mussel left, seriously—well, all individuals, since their birth—this really isn't just an anecdote, it's massive, it's a principle of the living world, mutual aid is everywhere. And among us, notice, this is the opposite of Darwin, it's not the struggle for life, it's paradise—I'm telling you it's Eden, that's it, it's said, in paradise there was no struggle between species, it was paradise, we're in religious discourse.
1:34:51 It's no accident that this doesn't come to us—not from him, from his own culture, he's French—but from the Anglo-Saxon, biblical world. I like—you know, I sound as if I were being ironic, but I'm attached to this culture, it's sublime in a way, I hold onto it, Eden—Rimbaud, that's my hell—yes, that's true, it was Eden I was thinking of. Humans—it's really very well developed—we're wired for it, we have hormones, we have a cognitive system that's very, very, very pro-social, which has also been discovered—evolutionary biologists have made a lot of discoveries in recent years. "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution"—that's a phrase from Kropotkin, a great geographer and anarchist of the late 19th, early 20th century—in 1902 he wrote this book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which I highly recommend, it's brilliant, and he surveys precisely these discoveries. Darwin had shown, well before Kropotkin, well before everyone, what he calls the reversal effects of evolution, where there's a threshold, and this is particular to man, where mutual aid is more favorable to the evolution of the species than the struggle for life, precisely.
1:36:01 But let me point out, in passing—I'm turning philosopher again to arbitrate a bit between the scientific discourses—that the superiority of man—not in terms of some measure of unhappiness, but the superiority man has acquired as master of nature, Tarzan, master of the animals, master of the bush, Bushmaster, man as master and possessor of nature, to use Descartes's most famous formula on this theme—doesn't come, as he says, from a biological endowment—that's the positivist illusion, it's not science, it's scientism, not science—it comes from a minus, not a plus. This minus being the generic prematurity of the human species, the fact that evolution precisely produced an accident—evolution isn't providence, we're not in religion, evolution does what it can. There are even, in the most recent books—I'm contradicting myself, I'm citing scholars like them, but interesting—I'm giving you leads here—places where it's shown there are enormous errors, including in the human body, things—nature does what it can, frogs lay 300,000 eggs to keep maybe 200.
1:37:11 Baby turtles, same thing, they hurry back to the water as soon as they're born. So what's the "minus"? It's that the evolution of the human species, in particular the shift to bipedal stance, produced an obstetric catastrophe in the female pelvis—a narrowing of the pelvic bones that made birth much more laborious and difficult in the human species than in other animal species, including in closely related mammals. Anyone who's seen a gazelle or a wildebeest in the African savanna get up on its four legs a few minutes after birth, and a few hours later be ready to flee danger with the whole herd across the savanna to escape a predator... how many years does it take us to stand on two legs? In other words, man is born prematurely. There are, of course, individual premature births in humans—I have a friend who was born at six months, who's now in very good health, thanks to medicine and growth—but on top of that there's a generic prematurity, which we can see clearly, for instance, in the fontanelle, a trace of the fact that development isn't complete at birth. Hence the recourse to the other...
1:38:21 solidarity was vital for the human species—not solidarity merely like ants or termites, which are also social animals, but innate like that, no, no, no—I mean the symbolic relationship to the other, language, etc., very important. So, I'm recalling some fundamental things here: that man's superiority—not in value, again, but practical, technical superiority—over the rest of creation, to put it in secular terms, over the living world, comes not from a plus but from a minus, which is perfectly expressed by the myth of Prometheus, for example. You know that Prometheus leapt up to quickly steal fire from the god at Olympus—sorry, at Olympus, from the gods—to fill a gap, because his brother Epimetheus, whom Zeus had charged with distributing qualities in a balanced way to each creature—you give strength without speed to this one, to the bird you give speed without strength, and so on—but he'd gone about it badly, since Epimetheus means the one with imperfect foresight, not very intelligent, so that by the time it...
1:39:31 got to man, there was nothing left—no claws, no scales, no feathers, no fur like the bear, etc. And so, to remedy all that—what a beautiful metaphor, precisely what frightens the ecologist—heat, warming, fire, interesting, right, which allows one to emerge from darkness and nothingness, light, warmth, energy. Those who survive aren't the strongest, they're the ones who help each other the most—it's the most cooperative groups that survive through evolution, and that's one of the principles of innovation in the living world. These penguins, for instance, they're together in a group, you know, they endure winds of over minus 100 degrees wind chill, and they huddle together, and those at the edge are colder than the others, and at some point they rotate, they take turns. If these penguins played it individualist, every one for themselves, they'd all be dead, there'd be no penguins. So it's a very counterintuitive but major principle in the living world.
Man, wolf or god to man 1:40:41 Mutual aid appears in hostile environments, when there are shortages, and in hostile environments mutual aid can emerge—I quite agree, but I don't see what's counter-intuitive about that. There are two mythologies among the Inuit, the Eskimos, the Inuit as you like—one for winter, one for summer. The winter one is hyper-solidary, whereas the summer one is full of stories of hunters' feats, isolated with their harpoon, facing a polar bear, individualistic. That's interesting, you'll tell me—but no, when there's a hostile environment and when there's nothing left in the shops, people kill each other. Ah yes, well both are true—how do we reconcile that? It's because we live in a society of abundance, and when there's abundance—remember, 500 energy slaves each—that's the good life, we're rich, we can afford the luxury of telling our neighbor 'I don't need you, I've got energy slaves,' and individualism becomes a luxury that can emerge because we're all rich, and we've created a culture of selfishness, of individualism, etc., and that's what becomes toxic when catastrophes hit.
1:41:51 And storms—I'm never closer to him than when he says something, even beyond what he thinks, he's actually deeper than he realizes at that moment. I tell myself the opposite a moment later—I say to myself, he doesn't see how stupid what he's saying is, even without thinking about it. But even a moment ago, he was reminding us of death—whatever we do, the human species is not animal from the instant it has consciousness, it has death. We need to be reminded that there's danger, that there's distress all the time, even in times of economic and material prosperity. The memento mori—that's what the Greeks did at a banquet, they'd parade a skeleton around to say 'enjoy it while you can.' It's good that wealth shouldn't be a factor of amnesia, of a bling-bling life, a shabby, superficial life with no history left, the way schooling has been accelerated under Macron. It's important to keep reminding ourselves what we've been through, how we got to the Third Reich.
1:43:01 It's important that we keep reminding ourselves that nothing is ever settled, that the greatest barbarities didn't come in barbaric eras but in eras with the height of technology and industry, that we're always threatened by this underlying substrate. This substrate is the great debate between Hobbes and Spinoza. Hobbes we all know, even those who don't know it's him—the most famous formula: man is a wolf to man, homo homini lupus. To which Spinoza replies: homo homini deus, man is a god to man. It's obvious that Spinoza is right—as arbitrarily as I'm cutting this short—by what right? Because the second contains the first, without the reverse being true. Man is vile to man—you never see an animal approach such cruelty. I know there are appalling things in the animal world, but they're not malice. The animal does what it can, not what it ought to—and as I mentioned earlier about the eldest of the wild dogs finishing off the younger brother, it's true that there isn't enough for everyone. So it's because man—
1:44:11 —is a god to man that Spinoza is right that he's a wolf as no wolf ever is. It's because he expects such recognition from the other—it's not that he's enormously wicked, it's that when he doesn't get that recognition, that's when we get into interesting territory. So there you have it: homo homini lupus, yes; man is a god to man, yes—because for man, unlike any animal species, the other represents a divinized value. You recognize the Hegelian struggle of consciousnesses for recognition. That's the culture, that's what produces the Nutella effect in stores—when you lower the price of Nutella, people start shoving each other. That's it, that's the culture of selfishness, kept alive by a mythology of every man for himself, the law of the strongest, mathematical equations, etc. There's an emblematic case here—he could at least specify that this is typical of a particular social class. I don't want to spell out the ABCs of Marxism, but really, it's so obvious here that I find there's a disproportion between how often he comes back to it and how rarely he names it. He denounces the industrial world; he doesn't denounce the capitalist world.
1:45:22 —which Jacques Lecomte develops in his book La bonté humaine—it's Katrina, New Orleans in 2005. You remember those images—I've even seen striking photos of Katrina, extraordinary—the documentation of murderers, looters, rapists, etc.—black people, of course—and so we see the National Guard, hyper-stressed, with an itchy trigger finger, and journalists on the lookout for looters, murders, etc. And in fact what studies and journalists later showed is that there is never panic in times of catastrophe—the closer people are to the epicenter of a catastrophic event, the calmer it is, the more people self-organize and develop extraordinary altruistic, mutual-aid behaviors—hurricanes, terrorist attacks, tsunamis, etc. Sociologists don't even talk about panic anymore—that's a representation we have, it's a mythology, our liberal mythology, let's say. It's good he's addressing the symbolic order—philosophically it's good—which considers nature to be aggressive, wicked, that it's the law, the law of the strongest.
1:46:33 —the war of all against all, etc., and also the myth of selfishness, where everyone is selfish and those who survive in nature are the strongest and most selfish. And in fact, at the World Trade Center, people were going down the twin towers with behaviors of gallantry, of calm, etc. Firefighters went back up knowing they would die, they went back up to save people, etc., like those at Chernobyl—they really went to their deaths. All the testimonies converge: in fact our species is hyper, hyper social—the term is 'ultra-social' in scientific publications, ultra-social. We are the most social species in the living world. Interesting there—it's suggestive, I come back to my view—it's interesting because he takes—it's not him who invented it, it's language I've already seen, 'ultra-social,' particularly in Anglo-Saxon publications—that is, as if the difference were quantitative, as if we were merely the most social of species, at the limit, whereas there's a qualitative threshold with death, the consciousness of death. It's interesting because they've heard that bees exist too, we're not the only social ones, wolves hunt in packs, there are a few social species—very far from being the majority.
1:47:43 But then man is the most social—it's not just a question of quantity. I'm fighting against anti-speciesism here—with man we move to a new genus—it's not just a more social species than others within the same animal genus, even if there will always be things in us that come from animality, but as long as we stay at that level, we're not yet in humanity properly speaking. Humanity begins precisely when there's something else—and that something else is a relationship to the other that is mediated by the shared consciousness of death, a consciousness that is never made explicit. Sorry, I have to play the philosopher here—an old philosophical problem going back to antiquity, to Plato already, which is classic: either things exist by nature or by convention. Is language natural, for example—are there words like 'plop' that somewhat imitate real sounds—or is language a convention, a sign? Are moral laws, legal laws, by nature or by convention? It's an old chestnut. Well, here I'm introducing a term that provides the synthesis, as everything richest and most interesting does—it's neither nature nor culture, it's neither the raw.
Connivance, the pact, and social injustice 1:48:53 —nor the cooked. Let me take a little detour so we understand—it's the fermented, the rotten, the marinated—ah, the little green cavities in Roquefort, that's it, the best part—wine, cheap plonk even, the fermented. Between raw and cooked there's a chemical power—fish Tahitian-style. Well, there's an equivalent here—I'm saying this—why?—between nature and convention, between the contract—that's where Rousseau, for once, is too formal, since I'm making a negative point about Rousseau—between the contract and nature, between the state of nature and civil society based on the contract, between the two there's a rich language to describe something that comes out of the contract but is a contract that isn't explicit—that is, the pact. You know, a pact is always more threatening than a contract—we say that in the German-Soviet pact there were secret clauses—that is, a pact always has secret clauses, has the unsaid, the unexplicated. So here I'm not choosing between nature and convention, but I'd say connivance—just as there's a before, there's an after-the-fact—the contract, right, I insist.
1:50:03 —because these themes are never developed—the same collectivism found only in the pact but less in the contract, its explicitness, as if it were lurking in language without ever being spoken—and that's why language isn't scientific, which is why scientists abandon ordinary language when dealing with stars or molecules—but in our language there is this relationship to death that never stops approaching and fleeing at the same time. So I want to substitute, as a synthesis to the alternative of contract theory versus naturalist theory, contractual versus conventionalist theory if you like, connivance—which doesn't have the clarity of the signature, of the convention, where one says 'contract'—so there's an obscure part which Mallarmé insists on when he speaks of a young man who apparently wanted to commit suicide.
1:51:15 —many at the time, a young poet like that, who said life today, the modern world and all that, and Mallarmé writes: 'you will note that we do not write luminous on dark fields; only the alphabet of the stars is thus inscribed. Man pursues black on white, oblivion of dark lace,' as if there were a secret in human speech that had to be preserved in the darkness of ink, at the bottom of the inkwell—'writes, and then puts away the lamp.' There you go, I wanted to recall this importance of connivance, of the pact—I like the word pact, all the great mythologies begin with a pact—Hagen's pact, in the Ring Cycle, that massacre which begins with a pact. So there is here, no doubt, a path to explore that justifies for me, despite the fact that Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy, that we're still doing philosophy—I speak of philosophy almost apologetically, the way Hölderlin spoke of poetry—how can one still write poetry? You know it's been said—how can one still write after Auschwitz? That's been said.
1:52:25 —the famous line of Hölderlin's that's been commented on: 'and why, in a destitute time, poets?' you ask me—like the god of wine's priests, they wander from land to land through the holy night. The holy night—there's a darkness to think about that we find again in carnival. You see, when we suddenly explore the underground of the human soul, it's interesting that we find it in certain Fellini films—I'm thinking of Juliet of the Spirits, that's Fellini, where all the irrational explodes like that; I'm thinking of Death in Venice, where there's the whole scene with the musicians who come to taunt people at the hotel, with the toothless men—there's that substrate there. And I combine that now with my Marxian substrate to say that what's most vile about social injustice, what's most inexcusable, isn't so much poverty—in the sixties, during the Trente Glorieuses, I sound nostalgic, no, because it was terrible compared to now—you don't know how many apartments in Paris had the toilet on the landing, there was no electricity.
1:53:35 But it was happier, because we knew our children would do better than their parents, whereas now people only talk about the end of the world or the end of the month becoming harder and harder for my kids, and many gilets jaunes who are old, with white hair, say: I'm on the roundabouts because I can no longer give my grandchildren Christmas presents, my pension has shrunk. So that difference—what's most vile about social injustice isn't just poverty—I just showed that poverty as a perspective isn't an anti-value in itself. The most terrible thing is to force the other to be close to death, to have no defense, to not have beautiful walls—like this beautiful courtyard here separating us from the noise of the street, from external danger, from peril—to not have Valhalla, in the Ring Cycle, the stake is building Olympus, the palace of the gods, where we're safe while the Nibelheim, the Nibelungs, are exposed to all the dangers roaming the surface of the earth on which the giants walk—three races: under the earth, on the earth the giants, in the heavens the gods, and us. That's why I admire a film.
1:54:45 —like Eyes Wide Shut, showing the negativity within this world of the gods. There you go, sorry for that long parenthesis, but I believe we can't really speak of end-of-the-world problems without addressing this aspect of the symbolic order. If I fight for social justice, it's not for moralistic reasons—it's because there is nothing more inhuman, in the strict sense this time, since you showed the importance of the consciousness of death in determining the properly anthropological sphere—I don't mean the Anthropocene here, but the properly anthropological sphere—there is nothing more inhuman, more horrible, than condemning the other to have no defense against death through poverty. I'm not even talking about concentration camps, but simply those living day to day right now in Mali—I'm not going to make a litany, the earth is a vale of tears, there's no shortage of examples—one of the most social, why?
1:55:49 Because at birth we're hyper-vulnerable—at birth, without mom and dad, we'd get devoured immediately, without uncles, aunts, the clan, the grandmother, the clan, without ultra-sociality, without the capacities—not just the clan, the genus—without the human genus, without which the clan wouldn't exist, because the clan has a language, it doesn't have an innate communication system like bees or dolphins, it has a language that wouldn't exist without the wider society, the state—it's hard to grasp. Marriage is an institution, whereas in the animal world the female may devour her young after having eaten to help them survive; in the first months of empathy, of discovering others' feelings, and of founding societies, we'd all be dead—and that's our strength, human sociality is what makes our power, and the paradox is that this very power is now what's destroying us, what makes us vulnerable. And so we've come to—you may have read Sapiens by Harari, great book—at the beginning he talks about the cognitive revolution.
1:56:59 —70,000 years ago, human beings went off into their heads, into their myths, representations, stories, etc., and believed in them completely, and we're still stuck in there, believing utterly incredible things—for instance, that there's only one law in the jungle, the law of the strongest. But honestly, if bacteria and fungi could see us, they'd laugh at us—it's crazy, they'd say, they're still young, they'll figure it out. And so the proposal being made is to learn to see through other lenses than competition—we've become hyper-competent at competition, let's become competent at cooperation again. It's no longer enough to rely on intuition, common sense and all that—we need to become competent, have economics departments devoted to altruism, Nobel prizes, mathematical equations, and then we can talk about a real societal project, or at least learn to walk straight knowing we have one hypertrophied leg and one rather weak one. So we know how to handle shortages—what's dangerous for human beings isn't arriving at shortages, because we've known how to do that for hundreds of thousands of years—it's arriving at shortages with this culture of selfishness.
Solidary trees, localism, and resilience 1:58:09 Another trigger is the vision we have of the living world. You've surely seen the books about forests these days, there are a lot of them—The Hidden Life of Trees, on plants, on the intelligence of plants, all fascinating, there are major scientific discoveries being made right now—for example that all trees help each other through mycorrhizae, passing nutrients from the strong to the weak, from adults to emerging saplings, and it completely shatters the vision we had of a forest where all the trees elbow each other for access to light. He says that it's in nature that this mutual aid exists, as though only man had strayed from it at some point, and we should go back to what trees have always done. No, no—nature is a frightful struggle, especially in the animal kingdom, by the way. And then there are plants—anyone who's walked a bit in tropical regions has seen a tree devoured by a parasite, lianas that strangle it, I mean—no mercy. Nature is the opposite—it's man who is, as I said earlier, the most social.
1:59:19 —the most social of species, right, to the point of this inversion, of not saying that man—if we listen to him, if we're willing to listen to him, and I'm quite ready to listen to him, to his desire to mutate away from selfishness, to re-collectivize mentalities a bit—that's all very well, but I'm a little worried this might benefit proximity—I don't know, in my opinion we'll soon get there—it's the local culture, doing your own little local development, making your own food in my geography, what I brutally call Pétainist localism—'the land does not lie,' the Pétainists, and the factory is bad, the land is good—and leaving to global society, that is, to the Pentagon and the IMF, the management of the planet. We shouldn't—watch out for local vegetables too, wealthy societies could drift toward that, leaving it to the powerful of this world to make sure we're not challenged by China and India.
2:00:29 There you go, that's a little hypothesis that I think we'll see next—and they're all in competition—there is competition, certainly, but there's also a lot of mutual aid between species, even minerals pass between different species, it's both intra- and inter-specific, and in fact the forest, nature in general, ecosystems have a lot of experience in resilience—that's what biomimeticists say—I'm sick of that term, you guessed it earlier, I flinched—this term was made so that we'd talk less about resistance—who does that bother? Resistance, with Gaullists and Communists, everything that was swept away by '68—I don't believe it's a coincidence—8 billion, let's be honest, even if he's thinking of the Resistance when he says that—there are plenty of people who think 'resistance' and say 'resilience' to be trendy. That's how ideology infiltrates, through semantic shifts like that—these 3.8 billion years of experience in research and development in resilience—in every enterprise you put a biologist to think about how to weather the storms.
2:01:39 Disciplinary competition—what is he? An agricultural engineer? That's it, that's what I understood—he's not the only one, we all tend to do that, each with their own discipline, as an auxiliary to politics, advising the prince—for him it's the biologist, for others it'll be the physicist, for others the doctor, for others the sociologist, the psychologist, business consultant—interesting—and of course Plato in Sicily with Dionysius, the philosopher going to advise Dionysius the ruler—it's the old scheme. That's funny—none of these ills will change, in Plato's Republic, until those who philosophize in the proper sense of the word—I quote it word for word—have gained power in the city, or until those who hold power in the city have become philosophers. The imperialism of one's discipline, or of discovering new procedures—that's well summarized by Gauthier Chapelle, with whom I write L'Entraide, in his book Le vivant comme modèle—I think it's a good basis for the Anthropocene.
Permaculture, certainty, and the indeterminate human desire 2:02:50 And to describe the principles of the living, especially for students, drawing inspiration from the living—that's exactly what permaculture does—twelve principles, three ethical principles and twelve design principles, and when you think about the design principles, they're exactly the principles of the living, and you apply them to everything—agriculture, housing, energy. Let me use this to illustrate what I said at the beginning, which might have seemed obscure—it's the incredible certainty of this guy: there's this, there's that, there's already a constituted body of knowledge, whereas at the cutting edge of fundamental scientific research there is enormous caution about asserting things far less complex than all that. He could exercise what's called inference in epistemology—what allows us to say that if A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C? Which seems obvious to all of us—if Pierre is Paul's brother, who is Thierry's brother, then Thierry is Pierre's brother—that presupposes a law called transitivity. We don't just get there—it has to be justified, it has to be demonstrated. There's this, therefore that—I'm not disputing the truth of what he's saying, but it's the tone.
2:04:00 —of scientificity that's so out of step with the scientific rigor he claims for himself, and has good reason to claim, that I can't help but point it out to the group—and it works really well. So, permaculture is a method for designing sustainable human systems borrowing motifs from nature. These parallels with nature are fallacious—as if we should imitate nature. No—what's unique about man is precisely the non-specific side of man, precisely the generic side of his desires—I always come back to the indeterminate side, which must remain indeterminate for the freedom of human desire, so as not to fix itself on one purpose once and for all, whatever it might be. Agreed that there's no final, assignable determination to human desire, because that's precisely what allows it to never be satisfied with a given stage of the environment—that's interesting too, agreed—that is, a non-species-specific adaptability, meaning my goal isn't to keep living for thousands of years in the jungle, or in Greenland, or.
2:05:10 —in the Alps, or in the desert like desert vipers, fine, but to be able to move from the desert to the Amazon, from this to that, from Germany to France, from the Mediterranean to Thailand—in short, man is nomadic, he's not just the Jew who is wandering, and that's one of the deep causes of antisemitism—I've jumped from one thing to another but it holds together—we resent Jews for reminding us that we don't have the luxury of settling comfortably in one place forever, since Pascal said that all of man's misfortunes come from not being able to stay quietly in a room for five minutes. It holds together—it's the anxiety immanent to human beings ever since they know they are finite—I prefer to say it's a bit the trembling in the imaginary register—no, it's the simple fact that the finite annihilates itself before the infinite, to speak as Pascal did—it's not just the moment you know you're finite, there have to be other stakes involved. So the fact that man is nomadic is quite extraordinary—the migration of early humans out of Africa, appearing in the Omo Valley, and who would go on to occupy—
2:06:20 —who would become Sinanthropus in China, Neanderthal in Europe—these migrations are extraordinary, right, never finally completed in fact, and they continue—what are the Gauls, the Germans, all that, the Celts—migrations that came from the steppes, right, from Asia. So I like this eternally migrant side of the human animal, right, but who everywhere reconstitutes a home—but a mobile home—which is always what's done, in the film Tomorrow they're interviewed, but they're friends actually, we're quite close to Charles and Perrine, especially with Gauthier, and they did it in Normandy—it's a very well-publicized example that we often discuss, well, that we often discuss—but what's wonderful is that they settled, very naively, on very infertile land in Normandy, and they botched their installation, they set up organic farming, took a training course for the organic market, and it didn't work, they were losing money etc., and so they were—I recommend—
Bec-Hellouin, land ownership, and the false opposition to the chemical 2:07:31 their book, it's really excellent—and afterward they made a sidestep, they applied the principles of permaculture and the principles of intensive micro-agriculture that came from the 19th-century Parisian market gardeners—I'll come back to that in a moment—and they managed to produce abundance. Not only do they produce a lot, intensively, without chemicals—I'm very glad there's nothing against productivity, we need to produce a lot to lower the unit cost, that's very good, provided it's done without harm—not polluting, there I'm all for it—without mechanization or nearly so, storing carbon, increasing biodiversity incredibly, the birds are coming back, it's crazy—and generating employment, well, I mean a lot of money, so that it's economically viable. So when we go in the direction of the living—and that's a great trigger one should have, especially in agriculture, something I didn't have at the time, which I discovered afterward—when we go in the direction of the principles of the living, it creates abundance, and when we go against the principles of the living—
2:08:41 —we have to spend energy and labor, oil—everyone sees things their own way, obviously. I understand better now, since he's an agricultural engineer, that his model is really the plant world. Hegel says somewhere in the chapter on religion—in the Phenomenology, three parts: natural religion, animism basically, primitive peoples, as one used to say, peoples without writing; second, aesthetic religion, the Greek world; third, revealed religion, Christianity—right, just recalling the outline, not disputing it—in natural religion there are several stages, he says that's where we passed from the innocence of flower religion to the aggressiveness of animal religion, the totems—as, in his own time, the English lion confronted the Congolese—interesting, a somewhat—how do we say now—an irenic vision—everyone says the beautiful, everyone says the kind—irenicism, an irenic vision that is drawn.
2:09:51 —toward the plant world, where aggression is less visible—I mentioned the lianas earlier, but it's true it's still less manifest than in the animal world. It's interesting to see here the agricultural engineer going against that and ending up producing less—and that's the aberration. So it's an invitation to plunge into the principles of the living—so in these post-industrial farms, which will obviously be vertical—with Gauthier we wanted vertical in the sense of having several plant layers—we wanted to show there would be three pillars: the first is the head—the agriculture of the future, three pillars: one, the head, that is, an agriculture intensive in knowledge, that's permaculture, that's the two founders of permaculture, it's very complex—complicated, no, complex, we're in what we were talking about at the start, the sciences of complexity—here you have a way of manufacturing an industrial egg, there you go, you need all that—the simple is for the oxen, a small elite is in the complex, but there aren't many people who are aware of the complex—here I'm being a bit ironic, but it's necessary, because this word.
2:11:01 —is starting to irritate me. When a guy is out of arguments, cornered on a proven, quantified example, he says 'it's more complicated than that' to get out of it—minerals, boats, gadgets, tractors—here you have a way of manufacturing a permacultural egg, it's hyper complex, well, there's a bit of zinc there for the gutters, a bit of zinc—how is that made? Zinc is made by electrical synthesis, it's complicated—zinc is made with two electrodes, metallurgy—well yes, when my wife is sick I'll be very glad to have industry behind me, but you have to know—well you have to—it's an invitation to know all the interactions between living beings, or as many as possible, and to deploy, to nurture, to develop mutually beneficial interactions so the system runs on its own—yes, no, I don't want to speak this way ironically, lightly, but let's go back to the example of the tsunami and/or the earthquake—take two cases, they might occur independently of one another, even if one can trigger the other—no serene—
2:12:11 —an undersea earthquake generating the appalling floods that occurred between Indonesia and India a few years back—so that's where it kills the most people, where houses aren't made of concrete. Look at Tokyo—it's extraordinary, Japan, damn it, there are tsunamis practically every minute, we barely register them anymore except the big ones—you see the tops of the skyscrapers swaying like that with enormous amplitude, as at the top of the Eiffel Tower apparently, when there's wind you can feel it, two or three meters of amplitude, and it holds—it's built precisely what's called anti-seismic construction. Whereas as soon as it's brick, in Pakistan, 300,000 dead at most. And creating abundance, that's exactly the art of permaculture, and it's very intense, very knowledge-intensive work at the start—concrete somehow helping him, he wants to go back to his farm, a somewhat modern farm, there's zinc, I love his notion of the 'egg,' what does he call it, the 'permacultural egg,' it's pretty, especially the drawing.
2:13:21 Did you see the drawing? We see plop, it's the conductor—it's about managing to know everything and to maximize, to stimulate what creates abundance in nature. At Bec-Hellouin they make 85cm-wide raised beds with a Coleman seeder—Eliot Coleman is one of the best market gardeners in the world, in the US, in Maine, the East Coast, he invented that—6 rows, he goes back over it, there are 6 rows, he plants between the rows and in the middle there are cabbages, there are 25 rows—serious aside, I'm looking at the photo, he has a big estate, this guy doing this, the best market gardener in the world—I don't know how he owns this land already, this space—never mind, I mean he's perfectly within his rights, I have friends with bigger properties than that who don't do this superb permaculture work, which I have absolutely nothing against—but in his solution, everyone should benefit from this land to cultivate, so that supposes a redistribution of land—you see a bit the problems that are supposed to be solved.
2:14:31 —and which are not at all—the political problem is never addressed. We'd have to redistribute the most sacred thing, you see, of capital, land ownership—can you imagine a guy with his second home in the Luberon saying 'here, I'll give you three quarters of it for your permaculture'? No way. It's interesting—so will there be landowners with sharecroppers, as before, sharecroppers doing the permaculture while the guys collect the rent and are in Paris going out at the Hôtel Crillon? No, but why?
2:15:02 On 85 cm, for those who've done a bit of market gardening, it's crazy, and they get several harvests a year, and this hyper-intensification means what? It means machines are no longer welcome, because machines trample everything, they're clumsy—so it's labor-intensive. It's the detail—he's not tall himself, but there he's, because there he's up to speed, it's his field—the Japanese modernized all this long ago, I say the Japanese because they're the kings of agricultural machinery, not like McCormick or Caterpillar, which are monsters, Goliaths trampling everything—he's right, but in Japan the space is extremely limited, between the mountains and so on, plus the number of mouths to feed, I mean it's extraordinarily—it's the most intensive agriculture in the world, that's why I bring up the Dutch, there are a lot of similarities—the high density, 400 km behind, so, you see, there are guys with basically each grain of rice practically pollinated by hand, in Japan it's hyper-intensive, the opposite of extensive farming, that great expanse.
2:16:12 —that you find in the Midwest, or in Russia, or even in the Beauce region. Simply put, where I'm going with this: they've developed small micro-machines to do exactly what's needed—you know, like the machines you now see, you who are in the Drôme, harvesting lavender, which is very complicated because cutting lavender is terrible—so machines that straddle the row exactly, like they now do for vines too—for a long time people tried, because harvesting grapes is beautiful to talk about from outside, but it's exhausting, especially at large scale. So I mean, there can perfectly well be industry in service of this, and there he's right to ask for machines that don't trample, micro-mechanisms but hyper-sophisticated, with electronic boards, chips controlling what needs doing—it's real precision craftsmanship. And the basic principle of hyper-intensive micro-agriculture, therefore without chemicals—because I remind you, if you want to produce more, I'm forced to intervene, it multiplies—well, this contradiction, this antinomy between the chemical and the natural, is unworthy stupidity—he knows it, if I tell him.
2:17:22 —he'll say 'no, but you don't understand what I mean'—and he'll be right—yes, but I don't want to understand, because for the mass of the ignorant, on the other hand, they're convinced that the chemical is the devil—yet what's more chemical than a natural plant, which contains carbon, has exchanges of anhydride, oxygen—everything is chemistry, it's the very key to reality. It's curious how 'chemical' became diabolical within a few generations—'I won't eat that, it's chemical'—the potato too is chemical, it's incredible, 'it's not organic, it's chemical'—but organic is chemistry too, I think of the superlatives, right, we must never forget that—there's nothing more obscurantist than opposing the chemical to the natural, unless we say chemistry is a human science and not a natural science—see where we end up when we tie ourselves in semantic knots. Choose a smaller surface—that goes against what's taught in agronomy: if you want to produce more, you reduce the size of your field and cultivate it well—localism taken to the max, Eliot Coleman.
2:18:32 That's a book that's been translated, fascinating, translated into French—there are others, Le Jardinier-maraîcher by Jean-Martin Fortier, a Quebecer who's also had a lot of success—and in fact it comes from Eliot Coleman, an American, along with John Jeavons, one also of the best market gardeners, who found archives of 19th-century Parisian market gardeners who, in the green belt around Paris, had a serious problem—Paris was drowning in horse manure, they didn't know what to do, it was the Paris police prefect's number one problem—and in fact they sent it to the market gardeners, who carted it there, it was hard physical work, but it fed an ultra-intensive agricultural system, among the most intensive in the history of agriculture—they got 7 to 8 harvests a year on the same plot. That's what's called the Dairy Belt in the United States, around big cities—there's always been intensive market-garden agriculture; you're not going to grow extensive cotton or wheat at the gates of Chicago, you grow vegetables, dairy, Dairy Belt, you see, cows, stuff for the demand for vegetables and fruit every morning.
2:19:42 —dairy products too, obviously interesting, per year, but they worked a lot. That's why the second pillar of the agriculture of the future will be the hands—the head, and now the hands—he doesn't want the machine, it's extraordinary, I mean there are small Japanese motorized tillers, hyper efficient, he doesn't want them, because that would be industry—it's terrible, we spent millennia freeing ourselves from manual labor, right, so we could finally make music, cinema, cultivate ourselves, right, travel—no, no, we have to go back—me, I was told 'hands on the table,' not gaining anything—that was with the priests, because my mother sent me to a Catholic school with the Jesuits when I was little, because we might masturbate if we didn't keep our hands on the desk. What are we going to do with a new generation of peasants who'll have to work—the 19th-century Parisian market gardeners, they worked—when there's no more oil, we'll have to work, remember, a barrel is 12 and a half years of labor—it'll be necessary to work. The slogan when there was the oil crisis, the oil shock, was 'we have no oil but we have ideas,' remember that, have you heard of it?
2:20:52 Right, well I used to say, damn, let's beware of peoples who have both oil and ideas, I tell you—being intelligent about both at once, that's—yes, it was work until late at night, until one in the morning, covering everything, avoiding frosts, etc.—it's a lot, a lot of work. So now we have other techniques, we can use what science has discovered over the past century, we can improve these techniques—and so INRA, INRA had measured at Bec-Hellouin that one could create a full-time equivalent job on just 1000 square meters, so 10 full-time equivalents per hectare—that's agriculture intensive in labor and in knowledge, but it's always intensive. And so I had calculated, extrapolating from Cuba, that within 10 to 15 years we'd need 120 million 'NIMA' farmers—NIMA farmers, meaning not from a farming background, that's the box you check when you set up in agriculture, NIMA—so neo-rurals, 120 million in Europe—Europe has 500 million inhabitants, so twice the size of France—that means.
Neo-ruralists, Khmer Rouge, and bucolic reverie 2:22:04 —that the neo-rurals, the future farmers, are already born, but they don't know they'll be farmers yet. Basically that's it—wanting to turn back the clock like that, wanting to tear people out of urban life and dump them in the countryside, when the countryside could feed today's humanity four times over, almost without manual labor, if there were both social justice and scientific progress—I mean, we practically have the means, I'm not being utopian here. This has been done before—it was the goal of the Khmer Rouge, which was already ecological in the sense that it was necessary to punish city life, where all the vices were—corruption, idleness—and go back to producing in nature, in the countryside—which has nothing to do with communism, it's the opposite of all Marxism, but which is, on the other hand, very much in the Buddhist tradition—not the Buddha, I mean the Buddhist culture of civilizations, the fact of fattening Buddhist monks all the time with sacrifices—that's all they do.
2:23:14 —carving out companies—that's not at all in the Buddha's texts, I'm not mixing things up, it's just as foreign to the Buddha's teaching as putting molten lead in the anus and eyes of Jews is to the Gospel's program—that's the Inquisition. So there you go, but I still want to point out, as a warning, that this irenic, almost bleating discourse—look, we're going to be like plants, we're going to help each other, we're going to go to the countryside, we won't have the big farms anymore like in the Midwest—we'll terrify that—I'd like to see it once in October, at harvest time, you see, over millions of hectares, apparently there are combine harvesters lining up at night, it never stops, with their headlights on, advancing like that—that's not my little pure field, my little garden, as an add-on to my second home. Let's teach all children how to manage, to be self-sufficient in food in the garden—that's an appendage to something that exists elsewhere. So, beware, beware of the precedent of the Khmer Rouge, I've said it, who completely emptied the cities to reconnect with the countryside.
2:24:24 Watch out for that—in literature, though, that's not murderous, but it's no coincidence that titles as significant in relation to the subject we're discussing—like the Bucolics, the Georgics, that is, the two masterpieces of Virgil, the greatest Latin poet, who frequented Augustus—that was the discourse of the Roman patrician who had his estate near Naples, that is, near Pompeii, that is, in the countryside—which gave us 'the countryside,' that is, not nature but humanized nature, with shepherds, flutes in the morning, bees making honey, goats giving milk—in short, all the content of the Bucolics and Georgics—it's a daydream, Marie-Antoinette's farm at the end of the 18th century at Versailles—these are the dreams of a world that has reached its limit, of a social class—when I say a world, in the worldly sense precisely, not of a global society but of a part of society that has reached its limit and dreams of coming to what?
2:25:27 —to the Garden of Eden. But of course, I'm for the generalized Garden of Eden—if it really were enough to be in nature to pick fruit and get drunk, we wouldn't be doing so well that we'd have been foolish enough to leave it—the human species is not a masochistic specimen. And the third pillar is the tree—the tree will be the pillar of the agriculture of the future. We're coming out of a steppe agriculture that was imported from the Fertile Crescent, where the tree is seen as an obstacle—I'm making a hypothesis, I'm nitpicking because it doesn't seem like his style, this way of wanting to take the opposite view of everything that's taught—it's true that humanity is a civilizational humanity, not so much historical, but the city is Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, a bit of India, along the great rivers, Mesopotamos—that's true, right—it's annoying somehow for a Western mind—you don't know this, but when I was a kid on the geography maps.
The tree of paradise, purism, and pollution 2:26:37 I was passionate about it, I looked at the names of the races, there were the Caucasians, us, that is, the Blacks, and then the Semites and the Hamites, H-A-M-I-T-E-S, do you know that one? The Egyptians, the pharaohs, that was classified as Hamites — it wasn't possible that they were "bougnoules" [a racist slur], but that they were part of the first civilization, that was the Arabs, that was unacceptable, so they invented an imaginary race, the Hamites. And you find that again in cinema, in a wonderful film — Snows of Kilimanjaro, no, King Solomon's Mines, the Stewart Granger one, does that ring a bell? The Deborah Kerr one — they arrive at the sources of the Nile and there, in the middle of the Tutsi — the Tutsi who committed the greatest genocide after the Khmer Rouge, curious, is that a coincidence? — they tell them, look, they resemble the pharaoh of Egypt, they're a race apart, not like the wretched, miserable Hutus. They will be massacred, of course. That's important, that's all I'm in the middle of saying, because — pay attention — there is nothing more murderous than irenic purity, purism.
2:27:49 Not purity — I have nothing against pure water, I prefer pure water to polluted water — but purism, puritanism I might say, is common to Protestant societies, to Muslim fundamentalists, and to environmentalists, because the opposite of pollution is purity, pure, unpolluted. And I recall that when I was a kid, the word "pollution" was only used for nocturnal emissions and stained underwear — except for fountains, where at the time it was used for the environment, water in polluted fountains — but otherwise, most of the time, "pollution" meant nocturnal emissions. That's interesting, it's the sexual stain. We go from spending energy cutting down forests, and then we plant poor cereals, a steppe-style agriculture, that's ridiculous, cereals don't even produce all year round, and they only produce on a thin layer of vegetation for capturing solar energy through photosynthesis, it's ridiculous — there the mask falls, it's the guy who eats so much to his fill in the environment he's still in that what matters to him is vegetables and fruit, the greens, whereas it's cereals — wherever it's cereals, that's the staple food, whether it's rice in Asia.
2:29:00 whether it's wheat here, corn elsewhere — the basic thing is you still have to fill your belly first, and then afterward, a little fun extra, you add a few vegetables, a bit of this and that, but that's the luxury — is that real, how did you get here, is that real? It's not true though that the forest captures energy on every layer and all the time — well, at least when there are green leaves, in a tropical environment that's all year round, here it's all the time except in winter — so we have a much more efficient agriculture, which is also, climate-wise, top-notch, soil-wise, top-notch — I mean, the tree has nothing but advantages. The early research work on agroforestry already shows that, that's the conclusion — it's Brassens, "beside my tree I lived happily, I should never have left it" — my tree, it's the tree of paradise, you shouldn't have taken the fruit — that's not bad. So there, we're still in semi-industrial mode, these are field trials, but there are many, many advantages to agroforestry, and if we push the cursor further, we move toward what permaculturists
2:30:10 call "forest gardens" — there, the field of the agriculture of the future — so we cultivate species imitating the forest ecosystem. Remember, I told you: when you go in the direction of nature, it creates abundance — in the steppes, in Iran, in Iraq, it's abundance of mosquitoes that produces abundance of malaria. When you leave a field free, it turns into steppe; here in Europe, if you leave a fallow field, after a few years you have a forest. Nature naturally moves toward the forest — let's go toward the forest. Nature, where it's watered, it's incredible — well, granted, yes, in a blessed climate like France's in particular — yes, let's say that to Mali, where they watch the sky at the end of September and say there won't be a drop of rain until the end of May. Naturally, without spending energy, and we plant the species that suit us best — maybe there will be a bit of cereal here and there, we'll see, it's up to us to create that, in any case that's one of the proposals. So, fourth room for maneuver: post-oil agriculture, three pillars. Conclusion: we're going to have to survive.
Surviving, regenerating, and hatred of the masses 2:31:21 That, I think, is pretty clear — humanity begins once we've gone beyond survival. Cave paintings are not necessary for survival — the employers' association, the Medef, would say that's superfluous. That's clear, we can live without making cave paintings — what a sadness that would be if we'd stayed at the merely necessary: drink, eat, you throw food on the ground like to an animal, without a plate, without a table, without guests, without a tablecloth, without an aperitif, without an after-dinner drink and without a digestif. Doing all that, all that is superfluous — what a sad return. In Cuba they went hungry, they made do, they organized, it was hard, they dropped below the WHO's recommended caloric level — there we go. Some collapsed — North Korea, when their Soviet allies collapsed, there were 2 million famine deaths. It can fail, but you can manage to do something too. That was in Cuba, I remember testimonies where they ate rats — my host family told me they ate banana peel sandwiches. When was the last time people ate rats in Paris? During the Paris Commune.
2:32:33 Not that old — 1871. They wanted electricity, it was crazy, and clearing the wastelands to do urban farming, that was hard. And in the countryside, agronomists, farmers, growers — imagine, they'll have to produce food for everyone, that's not easy either. Repairing and regenerating ecosystems, even less easy — if we settle for just preserving what we have, we're done for; we needed to preserve and repair. Why do you add "regenerate" on top of that — Lebensborn, Nazi program, fountain of life, Lebensborn, the regeneration of a decadent species, corrupted, sick, progressive, mired in democracy, we must regenerate, we've destroyed too much. On top of that we need to produce energy — if we don't have Norway's or Russia's natural gas etc., we'll need to produce energy, I include nuclear — it's troubling actually, it's one of the least polluting options — and do all that
2:33:43 without oil, and with an unstable, unpredictable climate and violent events, and agriculture is based precisely on predictability — that's going to be tough, it's going to be hard. And the transition, what I learned in Cuba anyway, my epiphany, was that over there they went hungry, they got moving, and there was a power that came from the people, from below — the power of necessity, which we don't have here yet, it's a threat, we need to get close to famine to rediscover the meaning of life — but that also met a power from above, organization — now, that was an authoritarian state, and again, I'm not making a case for war nor for authoritarian regimes, I'm only noting that at one point there were people even more authoritarian than Cuba and North Korea. I'm serious when I say that — when Barrau [says] states need to quickly take unpopular measures to save the planet — there is nothing more totalitarian than the ideological discourse currently being put in place through these threats of the end of the world. When I think we dared tell the Yellow Vests, you're defending
2:34:53 the end of the month, while we're fighting the end of the world — there, I gravely believe the problem was posed as well as at a moment when there were certain rather intelligent people who pushed in that direction, and when the two meet, things move very fast. In 4, 5, 6 years in Cuba there was a major transition, which are now case studies in sociotechnical lock-in, because they managed to unlock things. Here in Europe we have neither one nor the other — here we're not hungry, and we have incredibly powerful locks at that level too — we're not hungry, but it's never about social class, I think of all the mothers doing their grocery shopping in supermarkets, looking at the lowest prices, and it's not Nicolas Hulot who will contradict that — at the national level, at the European level, at every level. And what we wanted to do in this new book was go even further in collapsology, and go beyond the framework of science, and there it will be a rather open conclusion for discussion: how do we manage to live with this, so as not to collapse ourselves, perhaps to get through depression, because depression can happen, and that's okay — anger, sadness, anguish, that's okay, all that is normal.
2:36:03 That makes us living beings — perhaps stages of grief, we're going to go through a roller coaster of emotions. The idea is to welcome — the proposal is to welcome these emotions, because it's normal, and not to live them alone, but to welcome them together, and also to welcome all the reactions: those who get passionate about the issue, those who say what's the point, everything's screwed, let's go finish our lives at the bar — there are plenty like that, but these are stages, actually. I had my "what's the point" phase myself, and I come back from it sometimes, sometimes I get fed up, what's the point of all this — that's okay, but you have to accept that there's all this diversity, this biodiversity. And it'll hurt some — those who say serves them right that everything's collapsing, it was really too unjust, it's all rotten, bring on the collapse — very anger-based, but justified too, and it exists, there are many like that. And then those who say we're all in the same boat, and those who say alone we'll go faster, everyone for themselves — all those who don't have your cultural, intellectual and media resources, they blame the poor guy who goes to the local bar and stays a rotten mess — but of course he's an easy target, poor guy, he doesn't have access to a mic and camera.
2:37:13 like that guy there, and the international scientist with his vacations in Croatia — there's a bit of everything, and I think we all have these two reactions, we all have a survivalist and a "transitioner" in us, and accepting that — survivalists, transitioners, consulting that, that's already something — and seeing that it evolves over the course of life, in people, that's already a big step. And then imagining what comes next — do we base ourselves on Hollywood movies to imagine the aftermath? Do we see the future as Mad Max, as colonizing Mars, as a video game, in short, or as an urban vegetable-garden transition? Do we see the future that way?
2:38:02 That's the kind of question that only allows one answer — who would be stupid enough to prefer Mad Max to my little garden? That's the myth of progress, the myth of the apocalypse working unconsciously. Do we rather see it as: come on, we'll find great technical solutions and it'll be fine, we'll manage to stabilize the world — or do we accept, do we say, okay, there will be a great descent and we'll do our best, we'll manage this descent — I was waiting for that at the end, we have to start by going down, those at the bottom of the ladder will go down even further, all that is a matter of imagination, what story do we tell ourselves, what do we believe in, what do we want to believe in, what can we believe, who believes along with me, who wants to go in that direction, etc., etc. — it's evangelical in the end, believe in me, there's often who believes with me, who even follows me — the question of imagination is just as fundamental. And when I say we're going to have to live again, that means moving from survival to life — survival is a few months, maybe fine for a family, an individual, that's already better than nothing, but it doesn't make a life project.
2:39:13 And it doesn't make us human beings either — living is rather, what's the collective project behind it, even if there are storms, even if the canoe is in trouble, there's a little rock — what story do we tell ourselves, how do we come together, all that is the challenge of our generation, and you and we will be confronted with it. And to illustrate, I'll finish on this, the power of the imaginary — I took it from Rob Hopkins, the initiator of transition towns — here, he tells the ascent, the ascent of modern man. 1850, he's in the spirit of the Enlightenment, he's found the steam engine, coal, fossil fuels, the power of his genius, of his rationality, everything that produced these dreadful masses surrounding us — we must get out of the masses, and that, they create problems, I come back to the economy of scarcity, the anxiety that there isn't enough for everyone, there's a hatred of the masses in this completely unconscious ideology — the guy believes himself to be altruistic, certainly, he spoke of solidarity earlier — there's a hatred of the masses because he's denouncing, since 1850, the rise
2:40:24 of millions of people out of the nightmare. Before, people used to spend, they lost their lives earning them — I saw this throughout my childhood — they lose their lives earning them, literally wearing themselves out producing mere survival, without ever having imagined they might one day have time to go to the opera, I don't know — it's really extraordinary, simply to become musically cultured, I'll stay in the musical lane, to one day want to go see that live at the opera, okay. So all those masses — that's the common point of all these ideologies, common to the far right, the far left, environmentalists, etc. — there's a hatred of the other, because I am the mass for the other one. Even Lévi-Strauss, for example, a hyper-cultivated guy, one of the finest minds in Paris in particular, musically, and intelligent all the same, I mean structural anthropology is not nothing — even he, at the end of his life, was obsessed with humanity's overpopulation. Well, he'd gotten a bit senile by then, he was 80.
2:41:35 All of this always forgets — this is what's called Malthusianism — that if he finds there are too many people, it's always the others, they never place themselves among those who are too many; otherwise the right solution would be collective suicide. Separation of head and body, reason and intuition, nature and culture — he's really caught up in this mythology. And the power of his mind and of the Enlightenment will make him climb summits, thanks to machines, to technical power, civilization — and there we are, up high, we see everything from above, we see nature from above, we dominate, and then there are these dreadful environmentalists telling us, no, no, no, you're going to come back down, my boy — no, no, I don't want to come down, it's very unpleasant for this mythology, for these beliefs, to tell this climber that he's going to come back down, it's very unpleasant. On the other hand, we can tell him — we can tell ourselves — a different story: modern man is the one who dove into the sticky, stinking basin of fossil fuels in 1850, and there we are, right at the bottom, and now we can't even move anymore, we're stuck, we can't see each other anymore, we don't hug each other anymore, we don't look at each other anymore. And what if the story
2:42:46 of the transition were the story of getting out into the open air, finding the sun again, finding contact with others again — that's what the transition is, or not — you see, it's a story, the same curve, the Anthropocene, peak oil, whatever you like, nothing older than this ideology which believes itself postmodern — it's the same as the story of the Flood in the Bible, and that of Sodom and Gomorrah, I'll just take these two examples. Man had reached such a degree of excremental sin that God sent them the Flood — that washes away impurities, water or fire, fire purifies everything, fire is called "pur," "pyr" in Greek, it purifies everything. So this belief that thinks itself postmodern — there's nothing more ancient, more anchored in us, than this notion that as soon as we're numerous, there's an unspeakable filth. But you're telling a story, and it's not necessarily a beautiful, sugarcoated story, but it's a narrative — we humans, we love stories, we believe in them fully. So the question of emotions
2:43:56 of the imaginary, the spiritual question, the ethical question, everything that also falls outside the framework of science, will be fundamental for the years to come, and for the storms to come. And I'll finish with a little joke — he says, yes, the planet was destroyed, but for a good while we created enormous value for the shareholders — and I find that magnificent, because it has everything: there's the fire, symbol of community, there are the children, the future generations, there's the collapse behind it, there's the past, and there are the stories. Thank you for your attention. In a Marxian perspective, and I'd even say Hegelian-Marxist, I'll explain why, because I'll bring in a very Hegelian concept, the unhappy consciousness — the unhappy consciousness, which feels the need to escape unhappiness — and there, I'm not attacking it, I'm not defending it, the unhappy consciousness arises whenever, always at a moment when there's a withdrawal in production — that's why I'm a Marxist, it's measurable, so it's not up for debate, it's measurable, if people don't believe me
Unhappy consciousness and master's discourse 2:45:06 they need to measure it, they won't just take my word for it. I mean that when there is production — of wealth, understood — I'm not speaking in economic terms here, there are optimistic theories — as soon as there's a downturn, like when we moved, in the 17th century, from Descartes to Pascal — Descartes, the last avatar of the great Renaissance movement, look how optimistic the Renaissance was, we're owed the future, I want to read Homer's Iliad in three days, everything seems possible, the Renaissance is the explosion of humanism. And then suddenly, starting with Pascal, it turns dark, second half of the 17th century, because there are famines, because there's the great glacial cold period that ecologists tend to forget, by the way — as for me, it wouldn't bother me if the planet warms up if it means returning to the era when glaciers reached Nice, that's not my idea either, and it's not that old, so it goes back to prehistory, to Neanderthals. So what am I saying — I'm saying there's an alternation of optimistic periods, the first post-revolutionary Romanticism
2:46:16 for example 1830, and what was called the generation of disenchantment starting from '48, from the failure of the 1848 revolution, okay. Well right now we're living with the crisis of capitalism, which we haven't gotten out of since, roughly, the end of the 60s, the beginning of the 70s — that's very interesting, I repeat, the series: decoupling of gold from the dollar, a monetary problem we still haven't resolved, a problem we reject like the cornerstone, we reject it and it keeps coming back in our face, either in the form of armed conflicts in the Third World — that was the era of Vietnam, the wars of decolonization — or in the form of economic and monetary crisis, and hence the reappearance, end of the Thirty Glorious Years, beginning of the Forty Shameful Ones — here we are, mass unemployment. How can we let people do nothing while we're at the summit of civilization, of knowledge, of culture, of things far more interesting to do than losing your life earning it? And so there's a contemporary, postmodern unhappy consciousness, to speak your language, produced by the economic crisis — and what does it bring back up?
2:47:27 What always gets brought back up at such moments — the old religious substrate, we've witnessed the whole catalogue, I won't repeat it, the Garden of Eden, it begins with gardening, it ends with gardening, this story, okay — the model of what existed before the sin, that is, nature. The sin, he said, is 1850, the appearance of the masses — historically, it's indeed the appearance of the masses; before, society was rural-dominated, so those in power, at Trianon or wherever you like, the world was wonderful, we played blind man's buff at Trianon or Versailles, because the rural masses weren't worrying. And suddenly civil society appeared, bourgeois, and us, the middle classes — that's unbearable, mediation, there it is. So that's it, that's my conclusion: we feel anxieties and a pessimism coming back, produced actually by the return of a threat of scarcity.
2:48:37 Either directly, I'm thinking of people put out of work, which is not at all the case of the one speaking, or through the wariness of those who remain in the privileged classes but who feel, rightly increasingly, threatened by the access to consumption of more and more newcomers — and I mean here, you guess it, China. It's possible — if they make washing machines at the same rate as us, we'd need 10 planets — what does that mean? That we had our fun but the Chinese should be forbidden, and the Chinese housewife should go back to the washhouse in winter? That doesn't work. There's a dread that there won't be enough for everyone, and that there are too many people to share with — that's my conclusion, the anxiety of having to share with millions and millions of people, we're going to have to get used to it. We've never produced so much food in the history of humanity — because we're not moving doesn't mean people aren't starving more than ever in certain places, I'm not saying I have an idyllic, irenic vision — we've never produced so much food, I mean malnutrition
2:49:47 has never been so little of a problem, measurably — there's been enormous progress, in India, the green revolution, etc. In other words, we manage to feed 12 billion human beings better than the 2 billion there were in my atlases when I was a kid, so enough with the great fear. The great fear is that this changes tomorrow, that there are new arrivals, new partners in the game who aren't the same cultures, who aren't this or that — that's hard to swallow. In other words, there's a master's discourse — I'm sorry, but I'm speaking in terms of the master-slave relationship — which is completely unaware of this and which tells us, go back to your countryside — this discourse claiming to act in the interest of humanity and even of the cosmos — I look, earlier when he was talking about animal species disappearing — is a discourse emanating from a social biotope, if I may use this chiasmus, an ecological notion I'm transposing into the sociological domain — that is to say, from a social class that's reaching the end of its rope.
2:50:58 That's typical of the middle classes, which is neither the real power of the 1% who own the planet, nor those who'd like to consume a bit more and who find the world of the machine not developed enough because they're only just beginning to catch a glimpse of it — those gaining access to the fridge, the washing machine, I'm getting there — those who, here, have long since acquired household appliances, as they used to say in the 60s, and which China and India are starting to see on a large scale. We're living through great transformations in this sense, we're indeed heading toward the end of a world, but not in the sense we're told here — go on, it's not bad news, that's the good news.
