Psychologies Magazine, September 2002 —
From the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 to the one in Johannesburg this year, awareness has grown of the ecological threats facing our planet. We now know that it is vulnerable and that our industrial activities can threaten the natural balance to the point of jeopardizing the flourishing of life on Earth. We are all witnessing worrying changes in our environment: changing landscapes, increasing pollution, increasing climate change, food epidemics, etc. The "animal" relationship we have with nature is changing. Through sight, hearing, smell, touch, and even taste, we "feel" these changes.
I visit a small village in the Southern Alps almost every year, where I spent part of my childhood, and I am struck by the constant and significant retreat of the glaciers, which testifies to a rapid warming of the atmosphere. The streams I played in as a child have now dried up. The delicious fresh cow's milk has long since been replaced by pasteurized milk, which is odorless and tasteless. Fortunately, the air there is still pure, which makes the smells of Parisian pollution all the more unbearable for me.
More and more of us are feeling the negative impacts of these upheavals and are taking advantage of our vacations to go ever further into nature—the open sea, high mountains, deserts, tropical forests—to deeply recharge our senses. Will we one day be reduced to recording the images, smells, and sounds of wild flora and fauna to preserve our memories, as in the film “Soylent Green”? However, let us not fall into a naive nostalgia for the “good old days.” Certainly, our ancestors breathed unpolluted air, but how many of us would be able to endure the constraints of life in the past? Barring a major ecological disaster, we will never return to a life in perfect symbiosis with nature, as in primitive traditional societies, which even developed a nature religion. The neo-shamanist New Age movements are nice, but are based more on an “idea” that we have of nature than on a real and vital connection.
We no longer inhabit nature. We master and conceptualize it, even if we happen to spend an entire day in our garden (the very definition of domesticated nature). Since we are no longer "in," but "facing" nature, the question is whether we wish to respect it, to make "good use" of it, in Aristotle's words, or to persist in tyrannizing and exploiting it. Will we continue to develop "against" nature, or "with" it? Perhaps the very survival of humankind on Earth also depends on this choice. "Whatever man does to the Earth, he does to himself," wrote the Indian chief Seattle in a letter to the President of the United States in 1854.
September 2002