FROM THE END OF A WORLD TO THE REBIRTH IN 2050

Thirty-three years ago, the Greens were born, the first unified organization of political ecology in France. Until today, the representatives of this party, then those of its successor EE-LV, have filled almost all types of mandates in the elective functions of republican institutions. For little or nothing. From an ecological point of view, the geo-bio-physical state of France, Europe and the world is deteriorating compared to 1984, as shown by the successive reports of the IPCC, the UNEP, the Geosphere-Biosphere Program and other recent international alarmist publications.

From a social and democratic point of view, the situation is similar: widening inequalities, increasing xenophobia, and the stiffening of political regimes. Initially equipped with an immense intellectual generosity and carrying the only new alternative to the old left and the old right, the political ecologists have now lost almost everything, even their seats. They appear outdated, because they are not present in reality. It has changed a lot in the last thirty-three years, especially as the tipping point towards a global, systemic, inevitable collapse has passed. In the past, inspired by the Meadows report or the writings of Bernard Charbonneau, René Dumont and André Gorz, we already knew the main causes of the degradation of life on Earth and could have, at that time and on an international scale, reoriented public policies towards sustainability. Today, it is too late, the collapse is imminent.

Although political prudence invites to remain in the vagueness, and that the intellectual fashion is that of the uncertainty as for the future, I estimate on the contrary that the thirty-three next years on Earth are already written, roughly, and that the honesty is to risk an approximate calendar. The period from 2020 to 2050 will be the most disruptive period that humanity has ever experienced in such a short time. With a few years to go, it will consist of three successive stages: the end of the world as we know it (2020–2030), the survival interval (2030–2040), the beginning of a renaissance (2040–2050).

THE THREE STAGES OF COLLAPSE

The collapse of the first stage is possible as early as 2020, probable in 2025, certain around 2030. Such an assertion is based on numerous scientific publications that can be grouped under the banner of the Anthropocene, understood in the sense of a rupture within the Earth system, characterized by the irrepressible and irreversible overstepping of certain global geo-bio-physical thresholds. These ruptures are now unstoppable, the Earth system behaving like an automaton that no human force can control. The general belief in liberal-productivism reinforces this prognosis. The anthropic prevalence of this belief is so invasive that no alternative assembly of beliefs will be able to replace it, except after the exceptional event of the global collapse due to the triple crunch of energy, climate and food. Degrowth is our destiny.

The second stage, in the next 30 years, will be the most painful, given the sudden drop in the world’s population (epidemics, famines, wars), the depletion of energy and food resources, the loss of infrastructure (will there be electricity in the Ile-de-France in 2035?) and the bankruptcy of governments. This will be a period of precarious and unhappy survival of humanity, during which the main part of the necessary resources will come from some remains of the thermo-industrial civilization, a little bit like after 1348 in Europe and for decades, the survivors of the Black Death could benefit, so to speak, from the resources not consumed by the half of the population that died in five years. We will omit the atrocious descriptions of the violent human relations following the cessation of all public services and all political authority, everywhere in the world. Some groups of people will have had the opportunity to settle near a water source and to store some food and medicine for the medium term, while waiting to relearn the basic skills of rebuilding a truly human civilization.

We can probably hope that a third stage of rebirth will follow, around the 1950s, during which the most resilient human groups, now deprived of the material relics of the past, will find both the initial techniques for sustaining life and new forms of internal governance and foreign policy that can guarantee a fairly long structural stability, which is essential to any civilization process.

This kind of short sentences like a slogan can make the reader feel uneasy and wonder if this article is the work of an extremist psychopath who is wallowing in darkness and despair. On the contrary, freed from power and effect-seeking issues, we keep on acting to try to avoid the catastrophe and we consider ourselves too rational to be fascinated by the prospect of collapse. We are not pessimistic or depressive, we look at things as coldly as possible, we still believe in politics. The extremists who ignore themselves are rather on the side of the dominant thinking of the dominant religion based on the belief that technological innovation and a return to growth will solve the current problems.

If our prospective is the most rational and the most probable, it remains to convince the EE-LV militants, the French and all our brothers and sisters in humanity. The cognitive dissonance of our societies prevents this from being possible in time. However, the political orientations deduced from this analysis become relatively easy to describe: minimizing the suffering and the number of deaths during the decades to come by proposing today a project of rapid decrease of the ecological footprint of the rich countries, like low-tech bioregionalism, for the surviving half of humanity in the 1940s. In other words, to take advantage of the terminal availability of the powerful energies and metals of today to forge the few tools, utensils and simple devices of tomorrow (the 30’s), before these energies and metals are no longer accessible. Not surprisingly, unfortunately, our general perspective does not yet seem to be shared by the majority of ecologists who are holding their European Summer Days in Dunkirk. Thus, the final plenary on Saturday, August 26 is partly devoted to « industrial development » in Europe. An impulse towards the worst.

Yves Cochet, President of the Momentum Institute, former French Minister of the Environment. Article initially published on the site liberation.fr on Wednesday, August 23, then in the paper newspaper on Thursday, August 24, reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.