At a time when France is breaking temperature records, ecology is notably absent from public debate. The use of air conditioning does not answer this heady question: if so many people love nature, why do so few people like ecological discourse?
We cannot wait for everyone to become an engineer or a knowledgeable person to tackle the ecological crisis. And yet, who wants to breathe bad air, eat plastic, ingest eternal pollutants? Person. We must then rethink ecology, not as a constraint that would be perceived as “punitive”, but as a universal experience to be experienced.
A crisis of connection
The ecological crisis cannot be reduced to external effects, rising temperatures and disappearance of biodiversity. It is also an internal crisis, that of the bond. The connection to oneself, to otherness and to human and non-human living things. The feeling of isolation and loneliness is rampant. We are cut off both from ourselves and from our environment. The search for meaning in current upheavals is becoming crucial, and ecology must know how to respond.
We must then develop a 3D ecology, which integrates the cultural, endearing and societal dimension. Culture in the broad sense of the word, that which makes civilization, is a “glue” which associates the sometimes disparate elements of society, and gives them meaning. Art, for its part, is a singular desire, an intimate emotion, which meets universal expectations. And it is precisely these positive dynamics that ecology needs to awaken curiosity and the desire for transformation.
To be touched by ecology is to feel concerned, which is very different from just knowing or understanding it. This is not enough to act or change our perceptions and behaviors.
Come back to yourself
This invites us to change our outlook. The outcome certainly lies elsewhere than where the thoughts are directed. Cultural ecology then positions itself on a term – “What connects us” – and develops an ecology of attachment. It occupies the space left vacant between technical and scientific expertise, institutional ecology and activist mobilization. We believe that cultural ecology can provide a link between social demand and ecological ambition.
To do this, we must move away from normative discourses and imagine new creativity. Escaping the codified framework of hackneyed ecological themes, to come back to yourself. It’s not non-human “nature” that needs to be changed: it’s us. It’s about giving meaning to ecology by questioning our desires and our fears. There cannot be an ecology without attachment, because we protect what we love and what we are attached to.
Attachment enables this commitment. He establishes these links, neurological connections that neuroimaging shows, and which prove that it is the link that creates speech, and not the other way around. Alone, without connections, without shared passions, without others, and ultimately without ourselves, we live in an insane world.
Knowledge through emotion
We must popularize access to ecology by returning in particular to our common culture, in the diversity of its approaches and its knowledge. In the richness, both of its transmissions and of its novelties. Knowledge of the mind, knowledge of the body, intuition and sensitivity. The knowledge of emotion, and also the knowledge of the practitioner, which we too often neglect. It is a true “Geology of knowledge” that makes us up, and we can activate its multiple layers.
This implies trivializing ecology in the noble sense of the term, to better embody it. And to moderate Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am” with a new principle, the one that we all experience, and which also makes us human: I feel, therefore I am. Anyone who is not attached to the living refuses the links between humans and non-humans. Finding meaning is also experienced through the senses, and touches the very essence of an ecological adventure, in a renewal of relationships.
The heatwave makes us experience heat, through the body. We need to look for other voices/ways to sense ecology, within us and around us. Also think through the senses, as many indigenous peoples have always done, and right here in France, in our territories. An ecology that allows us to once again feel our place within ecosystems, and in a vast chain of relationships. No, ecology should not be limited to yet another constraint suffered. It must be the Adventure of our time, in which we all absolutely want to participate. We must defend this attachment from birth to the living.
And quickly!
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