“From now on, nature makes history”

What are the consequences of what you call “the Great Pandemic”?

First of all, I think that the negative consequences are exaggerated. The Great Pandemic was a whistleblower to get out of the ideology of progress. We put science back in the center of the village with the vaccines. Then we all understood that climate change was at the center of our future. Finally, it is now nature that makes history. For a century and a half, it was the opposite. Global warming is the real challenge facing humanity today. All our decisions will go in this direction. We know we are all going to have to adapt. The world has swung into climate war with astonishing speed.

Nevertheless, the negative consequences are there but you speak of “creative tragedy”…

We are in a post-war situation. Take World War II. The toll is terrible: 25 million soldiers and 50 million civilians have been killed. We can also say that Nazism was defeated. Same today. We can and we must mourn the tens of millions of deaths. But what just happened represents the greatest rescue operation in the history of mankind. Five billion individuals mobilized together, on all continents, at the same time, all fought together on a planetary scale. It had never happened. We will still talk about it for centuries and centuries.

Do you not incur the reproach of a certain euphoric idealism which wants to believe in what is not really happening? Can we not object to you that this pandemic has above all accentuated the rise of individualism to the detriment of common solidarity?

I don’t think so at all. From this pandemic will be born a new common of humanity. We must seize the opportunity to build it and above all to consolidate it for our future. It will become our weapon against the climate war, which is now the main subject. We live in a society where freedom has progressed extraordinarily. A sign: 63% of babies are born out of wedlock. For someone of my generation, it was 6% in 1968 and we were talking about “lost girls”. In less than half a century, we have collectively come out of the institutional rules. We only vote if we want to, we only get married if we want to, etc. How to manage to create a common with such autonomous individuals, who change partners, jobs, beliefs, who constantly move? It is very difficult to organize a society caught up in this general movement. But is it society that is in crisis or the institutions that are not adapting? The big complaint to hear is the loss of meaning of institutions.

How can this pandemic be the key to climate change? How is it “a pool of resources”, as you say?

Wars and pandemics always accelerate processes that are already underway. Society is on the move. It changes faster than the decision makers. The urban exodus is one of the illustrations. Many new practices are being implemented and accepted. We have moved from the industrial revolution to the digital and ecological revolution. The two are linked. It’s a real transformation. The power that artificial intelligence gives us can be one of the tools to innovate. We are and we work on the Web. We no longer have to live in large cities. We are going to live differently, opt for quality of life. According to the studies available to us, teleworkers are a very small minority in the acceleration of the urban exodus. Two-thirds of those who have left Paris since the pandemic have left to set up businesses, shops, provide personal care in the countryside. New social codes are being invented around quality of life, a new relationship to time, and a new link with nature.

Society is changing at high speed, faster than institutions or governments, you say.

Yes, the transformation has not been thought out enough by those who govern us. We make decisions but we don’t open the door to citizens so that they truly become agents of change. When we set drastic ecological transition objectives for 2050, no one is really mobilizing for such a vague, distant horizon. Difficult to motivate the population with such a vague term. Let’s set goals closer to home, quantifiable and measurable, year after year. We find ourselves between two anxieties: the great warming, a real challenge, and the great replacement, pure identity fantasy. The only way to extinguish anxiety is through action.

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