Facing ecoanxiety. What hope to not sink?
Johannes Herrmann
L’Escargot, 122 p., 16,90 €
Ornithologist, Johannes Herrmann publishes a second striking essay (1), which combines life stories, scientific facts, and spiritual reflection. Its story is a bit like that of all the naturalists who, throughout France, record the presence of animal species. And document “this crisis of extinction” described in international reports.
The ecologist has become ecoanxious, he goes to work “the lump in the throat”. He recounts, however, with a removed feather, the moving rescue of the little bustard, or those entire nights helping toads cross a road to reproduce without ending up crushed. But when he and his colleagues fight on ten fronts, hundreds more are deserted. And global indifference, or worse, anti-environmental attacks, are seriously ruining morale.
What’s left?
Johannes and his wife Mahaut are Christians. They received the encyclical with great enthusiasm Laudato yes,’ in 2015. They participated in green Christian groups, got involved as best they could. Here too, the observation is gloomy: “In the Church, the time is no longer to build bridges but to blow them up. »
What’s left? Johannes Herrmann clings to this collective work and also to prayer for the ecological conversion of the world. The book concludes with magnificent pages on hope, which is “above the void, this finger to which we cling and which always refuses to let go”.
(1) After The Forgotten Life (First part, 2018), published with his wife Mahaut Herrmann.