Psychologies Magazine, September 2002 —
From the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 to the one in Johannesburg this year, there has been a growing awareness of the ecological threats facing our planet. We now know that it is vulnerable and that our industrial activities can threaten natural balances to the point of jeopardizing the flourishing of life on Earth. We are all witnessing the alarming changes in our environment: evolving landscapes, increased pollution, a rise in climate disruptions, foodborne illnesses, and so on. The "animal" relationship we have with nature is being altered. Through sight, hearing, smell, touch, and even taste, we "sense" these changes.
I visit a small village in the Southern Alps almost every year, where I spent part of my childhood, and I'm struck by the constant and significant retreat of the glaciers, a testament to rapid atmospheric warming. Streams where I used to play as a child are now dry. The delicious fresh cow's milk has long since been replaced by pasteurized milk, devoid of smell or taste. Fortunately, the air there is still pure, which makes the smells of Parisian pollution all the more unbearable.
More and more of us are feeling the negative impacts of these upheavals and are taking advantage of our holidays to venture deeper into nature – the open sea, high mountains, deserts, rainforests – to deeply replenish our senses. Will we one day be reduced to recording the images, smells, and sounds of wild flora and fauna to preserve their memory, like in the film "Soylent Green"? Let's not, however, 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 catastrophe, we will never return to a life in perfect symbiosis with nature, as in traditional primitive societies, which even developed a religion of nature. The neo-shamanistic New Age movements are appealing, but they are based more on an "idea" we have of nature than on a real and vital connection.
We no longer inhabit nature. We control and conceptualize it, even if we sometimes spend an entire day in our garden (the very definition of domesticated nature). Since we are no longer "in" nature, but "facing" it, the question is whether we wish to respect it, to make "good use" of it, in Aristotle's words, or persist in tyrannizing and exploiting it. Will we continue to develop "against" nature, or "with" it? Perhaps the survival of humankind on Earth also depends on this choice. "Whatever man does to the Earth, he does to himself," wrote Chief Seattle in 1854 in a letter to the President of the United States.
September 2002