The Destruction of Our Survival Resources by Our Excessive Lifestyles
Your fields stink of acid soils, wrecked by thirty years of filthy phytosanitary products and deep ploughing; soils that turn to dust in summer and mud in winter; soils that are no longer worth anything, that have become nitrate reservoirs and are poisoning our water.
Everyone drinks 70 mg of nitrates per litre of water — that's the truth.
That maize isn't used to feed human beings, and not even the animals. It goes straight to the anaerobic digester. More profitable, eh? Fine model: we put Saudi oil in the tractors, we pour Russian gas and Chinese phosphates on the land, we sow German lab seeds in it, we get fake plants out of it, we let them rot and we sell the whole lot as 100% made-in-France biofuel! It's fossil-fuel fencing of stolen goods, that's what it is.
And the animals — they don't know the taste of grass, so we might as well feed them transgenic soy grown in Brazil that arrives at Le Havre by whole container ships. And all that gives you Crème Jobard, star product at your local Leclerc, local products aisle! The cream of the bocage! The cream of the Amazon, more like. The cream that destroys the tropical forest over there, the cream that pollutes the land here!
He loves his animals so much that he has crammed them in there, in the barn, udders swollen, waiting for milking morning and evening. He inseminates them a month after calving, one hand up the backside, the other on the semen gun! He takes their calves at birth! He sends them to the slaughterhouse at 5 or 6 years old, so they don't suffer too long!
At my place, we leave the animals outside, we feed them hay, we drink raw milk and we do our neighbour a good turn.
The West is sick. It produces sick brains, sick animals, sick lands.
Stop with your generalities! Jobard belongs to a lost generation, trapped by the banks and the farming federations. But he has had the courage to ask himself the right questions. He is in full transition towards reasoned agriculture.
He is reducing his inputs, year after year. Ploughing less deep, centimetre by centimetre. Covering his soil with green manure in winter. Who knows? It may be to his land that the earthworms return first.
One therefore had, paradoxically, to desire the collapse of industrial societies as the only credible way of avoiding the worst. The time remaining was counted less in years than in ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. Ppm: parts per million. Millionths. A measure at once infinitesimal and colossal. Beyond 500 ppm, the planet would become a vast inhospitable steppe and only a handful of Homo sapiens would remain, taking refuge in Greenland. We had already passed 420 ppm. So we had to hurry.
Salim had drawn two rules of action from this. The first was political. The greatest enemy was not the capitalists, who were cheerfully racing towards their doom. It was the degrowthers, irresponsible people working to prolong our ways of life at the cost of a few derisory adjustments.
The second was practical. One had to be ready for the great unplugging, for the day when nothing would switch on anymore, when social organisation would vanish at a stroke like a computer crashing. The only question worth asking was that of vital needs. It was complex but, if one went about it well in advance, not insoluble.
Coming out of that tormented summer, Salim therefore made definitive resolutions. He did not look for a permanent contract as his parents urged him to, knowing perfectly well that this "indefinite duration" promised by capitalism would soon be interrupted by its implosion. He did not want to move: Saint-Firmin remains a commune modest enough in size to hope that, when the time comes, the inhabitants will decide to help each other rather than kill each other. He also resolved never to start a family, synonymous with mouths to feed.
Thus freed from any ambition other than his own survival, Salim finds existence surprisingly pleasant.
So as not to remain a burden on his parents and to generate a minimal income, Salim contents himself with odd jobs. He did not even bother applying for welfare benefits, of little use once the administration has returned to nothingness. He prefers to be paid under the table and does not care about contributions, convinced that the pension funds will be swallowed up in the general bankruptcy well before he reaches the age to claim his rights. He takes care never to leave too much money in his account, which would be so much lost at the time of the great banking crash. He quickly converts every banknote into tinned food, seed packets and electric batteries.
In the fairly extensive free time at his disposal, Salim amuses himself doing everything that will become impossible after the collapse. He wants to gorge himself on images of the world before.
Blablacar, low-cost flights — he stuffs himself with streamed films and series, he stockpiles memories while rejoicing in his carbon emissions, which can only hasten the advent of the inevitable.
Salim did try to convince his parents of the soundness of his theories and his way of life. A lost cause.
He who reasons in millions of years cannot understand why people strive so hard to improve the living conditions of the little polluting mammal that we are.
In his family, Salim is regarded as a failure and, in the village, as a simpleton. He could not care less. He is convinced that one day he will be treated as a prophet.
He really is not fussy about the modalities of collapse. Financial crisis, destructive hurricane, computer failure, apocalyptic drought: anything suits him.
Only one question continues to preoccupy him: why survive? Not for society, which deserves to crumble under the weight of its own injustices. Not for humankind, to whose perpetuation Salim has already given up contributing. Not for nature, which would gladly do without this species turned invasive. For himself, then? But what joy will he be able to find amid universal misfortune?
The city eco-types were still looking for fake-rustic getaways where modern comfort had to be at once guaranteed and concealed. They still had not understood that nature was a means of survival more than a source of peace.
They have been told so often that China, and behind it the rest of the world, was advancing towards an era of digital bliss, that they cannot help cultivating a certain nostalgia for the harsh life of ancient times.
Everything went so fast. Their grandparents lived in the Middle Ages, in poverty and oppression. Their parents worked relentlessly to catch up a millennium in thirty years. Their task is to build a modern, pacified and prosperous society. China will decarbonise as fast as it industrialised. Flying taxis will transport the sick, brain chips will make everyone super-intelligent, robots will do the housework and educate the children. China will be reunified and will enlighten the world.
...
The events of Saint-Firmin are no doubt the prodromes of European decadence, after 5 short centuries of inexplicable dominance.
...
They are aware of the risk: letting themselves be won over by the irresistible allure of decline. They want to return without too much delay to civilisation, to the glittering buildings, the autonomous taxis, the connected fridges and payments by retinal recognition.
Capitalism which manufactures slaves. Extractivism which ravages the planet. Globalism which crushes peoples. Colonialism which renders people like him invisible. Productivism which poisons the countryside. Jacobinism which makes local liberties disappear.
For the thirty or so executives seated in a circle, it is a moment of relaxation eagerly awaited, a bit like the museum outing when you are in secondary school. The mood is light. The advantage of these great challenges is that there is not really anything at stake. The meeting will end with neither winner nor loser. Nobody is playing for their budget or their job.
If you do not want to listen to the scientists, do not invite them. We are all wasting our time.
You are industrialists. However many corporate responsibility programmes you run, however good your decarbonisation figures and however promising the green techs you invest in, your core business is extractivist. You are programmed to destroy. You will go and draw the last available drop of water to build the last concrete building. Then you will count your profits. Your shareholders will be pleased with you. With their dividends, they will be able to buy rainwater collection tanks and reverse-osmosis purifiers to dissolve the forever chemicals. They will survive a little longer than the others. But not very long either. For one day, all will be swept away by the collapse of ecosystems — and you with them. You will realise too late that you are not only human resources but also beings of flesh and blood, living beings linked to all other living beings by a long chain of interdependencies. You will understand too late that no one can live on a lifeless planet. In the meantime, no one will be able to convince you.
I tried for so many years, in the course of hundreds of meetings that resembled this one and that ended, as this one will end, with a few self-satisfied bullet points in an internal report.
Society takes you for rational people — too rational, even. In fact, you are the most irresponsible, the most obscurantist, the maddest among us! I prefer to return to my lab to calculate the pace of the catastrophe. It is perhaps just as absurd, but more dignified. At least humanity will have been conscious of its own ineptitude.
Imagine, for example, that Paris is submerged by the hundred-year flood of the Seine, the one we try at all costs to avoid by building derisory dams on the Yonne, the Aube and the Marne. The river will be all the more unleashed for our having tried to tame it. It will smash through its banks like a horse breaking its reins. This plant here, the flagship of the Île-de-France, the pretty showcase for managers' meetings, will be overwhelmed by the influx of rainwater. The valves will have to be opened, discharging untreated water, in an emergency. Imagine the streets drowned in thick mud, the makeshift rafts built from bits of Ikea furniture, two million inhabitants stuck at home without supplies or drinking water, cars full of corpses. It will be less amusing than Venice's acqua alta.
Imagine then that the authorities announce a figure, a perfectly correct figure: an unprecedented reduction in traffic accidents in Paris. Is it true? Is it false? The water re-use figures are of the same ilk. They are correct, all other things being equal. But other things will not be at all equal. And because of whom? Concrete-pourers like you. It is the perfect crime: you pump the water out of the aquifers, and you prevent the rain from replenishing them by paving over the soil.
This is the Jevons paradox (1865): the more efficient an energy is, the more its consumption increases. One day or another, the bill will have to be paid for everything we waste.
Facts that no one wants to see and reasoning that no one wants to hear.
Shame at these hypocritical nods, shame at this ridiculous badge, shame at these new colleagues and their smugness, shame at belonging to a species capable of devising strategies so perverse, so falsely virtuous, to satisfy one passion: the desire for domination.
Greed does not explain everything. The real objective is to dominate men, dominate nature.
He has never needed to work for a living, regards his professional life as an occasion for inexhaustible amusements, and fulfils his duties as communications director with an amorality that makes him very skilful. He is a harmless heir, averse to excess, always affable and impulsive. He fears only one thing: earnestness. However much he distrusts grand theories and cultivates a quiet cynicism, he nonetheless possesses a minimal bedrock of definitive ideas that he feels, for once, ready to defend. Of course we need airports, motorways, office towers. It is development. Everyone is entitled to it. Even Iran, Arsham adds bitterly.
Martin puts down his spoon in vexation. He is not short of arguments, especially with the floods and droughts following one another dramatically in Iran. But an unusual weariness leaves him speechless.
Now that all eroticism has vanished, he perceives the wall of misunderstandings that separates them.
Arsham always nodded when Martin shared his convictions or his indignations, but he could have told him exactly the opposite. In fact, this guy thinks nothing — only what it is customary to think when one never makes the slightest effort.
Love has gone; friendship does not survive. Martin finds him ugly and stupid.
A documentary on space tourism.
She regularly posts photos of her business trips to San Francisco, Singapore or Johannesburg, and of her holidays in Mexico or Thailand. She is living the last hours of globalisation in the greatest insouciance.
Nathalie's father, a mere senior auditor at the Court of Accounts, was ruining himself to maintain his status as a "button" in a stag-hunting equipage and devoted his conversation exclusively to two insoluble problems: the health of his horses and the balance of public finances. Her mother held a middle-management post in the marketing department of a luxury multinational, where she had to convince consumers to buy products she despised. Both compromised with their era only in the sole hope of preserving and passing on the values that condemned it. Nathalie had quietly abandoned her parents' faith but retained from her upbringing what she called the "sense of duty". Duty to what, for whom, in the name of what God or what axiom — it hardly mattered.
The volume of water on Earth is considered stable. The H2O molecule is heavy. It does not escape. For several billion years, a thousand billion billion litres have been circulating on the planet, and it is not the minuscule actions of Homo sapiens, with its dams and its nuclear power plants, that will change a single zero of it. There is nothing to regenerate, because nothing is destroyed. It is the story of Julius Caesar's glass of water. Do you know it?
Does this glass in front of me contain the same water as the last cup drunk by Julius Caesar before he was assassinated?
A glass of water contains ten to the power twenty-five water molecules. The figure one, followed by twenty-five zeros. To give you an idea, that is more than the number of grains of sand on Earth. Let us suppose that today these molecules, returned to the ground two thousand years ago and redistributed through the great cycle of evaporation and precipitation, are dispersed equally among the thousand billion billion litres of the rivers, aquifers and oceans. A simple division suffices to conclude that each of these litres of water must contain on average ten thousand of the ten-to-the-twenty-fifth original water molecules. So in a glass like this one, we find roughly two to three thousand of the H2O molecules present in Julius Caesar's last cup.
The only real difference, she continues, is that Julius Caesar drank water without chlorothalonil, without metazachlor, without trifloxystrobin, without ametoctradin, without isoxaben, without triallate, without chlorotoluron, without carfentrazone, without captan, without polyfluoroalkyls — and I could go on with worse.
— We do monitor all that, all the same, protests Martin out of an old corporatist reflex.
— You know very well that this is not the case. Most pesticide metabolites are subject to no surveillance at all.
— The ANSES has defined thresholds. 0.1 micrograms per litre, as a general rule.
— For the so-called relevant pesticides! But the others? The so-called "non-relevant" ones?
— There are what we call guide values…
— They correspond to conveniences of measurement, not to scientific realities. What counts in any case is not the dose of this or that substance, it is the cocktail! You see, by piling up thresholds, we build staircases. And where do these staircases lead? To hormonal disruptions, infertility, cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, antibiotic resistance.
— Let's not exaggerate, says Martin without conviction.
— And the PFAS, the forever chemicals? They are not even catalogued!
— Those — if we started analysing them, there would be riots.
Martin knows well that the potability of water is an administrative notion, not a health one. It was, at the ministry, the best-kept taboo. Now he has the right to think it, and even to say it.
— Our organisms try to adapt; they may succeed in a few thousand years, but in the meantime they endure the assault of hundreds of new molecules whose toxicity we barely know. Even if we banned them now, all these xenobiotics invented by man and unknown to natural evolution will remain in the soils, in the waters and in our bodies for centuries to come. Did you know that 4,4-DDE has been found in the hair of every MEP tested? 4,4-DDE is the metabolite of DDT.
— But DDT has been banned for over forty years!
— That is what we call persistence. As a result, our microbiomes are completely disturbed. We are as disrupted as the climate. If Julius Caesar drank a glass of our water, he would drop dead, poisoned.
Valérie launches into a long monologue against chemical agriculture, which revives Martin's worst memories — of when she explained, in the middle of a consultation meeting with the FNSEA, how the inputs were derived from the lethal gases developed by the army during the two world wars.
He searches in vain for objections and counter-arguments. He would like to prove her wrong, to still believe in a certain rationality in the elaboration of agricultural policies over the last half-century, but he can no longer manage it. He admits that, behind the proliferation of nit-picking regulations, the essential may have been obscured; that the general interest may have been to the Séquoia tower what God is to a church — an echo that resounds everywhere but is heard nowhere; that this administrative wall he helped build serves only as a screen for thieves and poisoners. He slowly opens himself to the hypothesis that the Republic is only a fiction useful for war and commerce.
— In fact, concludes Valérie, all the water we drink, everywhere in the world, whether from the tap, from bottles, from rivers or from the sky, is disgusting. The poisoning is universal. Chemical substances have even been found in the rain falling on the Tibetan plateau. Perhaps we don't die of it, or not too much. Is it any less serious for that?
Martin thinks back to the intervention of that young woman under the covered market of Saint-Firmin, already two years ago. She was right: water can, water must be pure. If there is no more pure water, it is because purity has disappeared from the world.
The enormous Holsteins queue one behind the other on the milking platform, with a patience and courtesy rarely encountered in human beings. The tentacles of the milking machine begin to detach one by one, swinging at the end of their cords like the oxygen masks in aeroplanes. The Holsteins remain motionless, without a sigh, a movement of the neck, a bending of the hocks betraying the slightest relief. They seem genetically programmed to feel nothing. They have made a pact with the machine. They are machines.
— In any case, Martin continues, gathering his courage, we cannot go on with this nitrate level.
— It doesn't come from my place. There is a protection perimeter around the spring. I have always respected it.
— Five thousand square metres! Half a hectare! It's ridiculous.
— Anyway, nitrates have never killed anyone.
— We don't know. There is a carcinogenic potential…
— Life is carcinogenic. With your precautionary principle, we'd do better not to be born.
— One day or another, the prefect is going to come down on us.
— Didn't you tell me she was your friend? Besides, she's quite happy that we feed the world. Ammonium nitrate means three per cent more yield and one per cent more protein. Full stop.
— Seventy-five milligrams per litre, as on the last reading — that's illegal, you know it well.
— I'm not the one to be lectured on respecting the law! I have enough trouble respecting their spreading calendars that change all the time. Not to mention the no-go zones, the grass strips, the watercourse margins, with those idiotic measurements that vary according to the degree of the slope, the composition of the fertiliser and the captain's age. All these rules laid in offices make no sense.
— This is not about rules. It is about the village's water. With your pumping, your drains and your inputs, it is you who are stealing it from us, today. Now you must give it back.
— You'll admit it's a nice trade, chartered accountancy. You don't get your hands dirty. You live off bureaucracy and you help the rich escape it. Meanwhile, clodhoppers like me work every day of the year, we're covered in debts, drowned in paperwork, we get inspected by the white collars of the prefecture and showered with insults by the city bobos; our wives leave and our children spit in our faces! We should go on strike, like the railway workers and the teachers; we should block Rungis and starve you out — in three days you'd be on your knees. But we can't. We can't let the weeds grow in the fields, the harvests rot and the cows bellow, their udders on fire. So we stay there, in our overheated tractors, our lightless barns and our stinking milking parlours, and we carry on the labour of the ancients, we wrench treasures from this bitch of a nature, we turn manure into sterilised milk, so that the chartered accountants, the énarques and all the lesson-givers have well-stocked fridges. And then they come and call us thieves!
He recognises, sprung intact from his uncle's mouth, the cry of anger of the peasantry, that centuries-old cry that has never ceased, the cry of the jacqueries and the demonstrations against Brussels, the cry of the land and of those who work it, condemned to the same destiny, as if, whatever the eras and the grievances, this union of man and nature could never take place without suffering.
— I underestimated what the city can do to a country lad. You've gone over to the other side. You talk to me about drains and inputs like the bastards from the OFB, like all those who know nothing about it.
Martin realises that, without paying attention, he has crossed a tacit line. In Paris, you get a second chance in a conversation. Not here. Words become definitive. They can clutter an existence for whole decades — chewed, re-chewed, ruminated, reduced to pulp but never digested.
Abroad remained for Kevin a fairly abstract notion, which he regarded with benevolent indifference. He would gladly have gone there if he had had a good reason to. Failing that, he saw no point in devoting so much time, money and energy to translating himself from one point of the globe to another. For anyone with the patience to look around, exoticism was everywhere. The smallest watercourse resembled the Iguazu Falls; the smallest encounter would have filled a novel: a question of scale.
During his holidays, Kevin hiked in his native Limousin, camping by the wayside. For the price of a snack, he travelled through ever-changing landscapes, listened to village gossip while filling his flask, studied the comings and goings of animals at nightfall. From one valley to the next, he changed worlds. As Arthur said, quoting Leibniz (or another of those philosophers), there are no two identical blades of grass in the universe. Why would he have gone looking for blades of grass in Peru or Thailand? Examining his IGN maps, Kevin had realised, not without melancholy, that a whole lifetime would not be enough to explore the region's trails.
Once one of the most fertile lands in France, the Saclay plateau had been transformed into a functional desert, an endless retail zone where the shop signs had been replaced by "Polytechnique", "Telecom" or "École normale supérieure". It claimed to gather the best brains in France, students and researchers alike. But what becomes of a brain imprisoned in an implacably geometric space, blinded by the wan neon of the corridors, immersed in a forest of cranes? An atrophied supermachine, ready to reproduce with other supermachines to design a world of supermachines. Was this the mission now assigned to the future agronomists of AgroParisTech? To learn the right talking points on regenerative agriculture in order to transform French farms, with a clear conscience, into meat factories covered with solar panels?
He saw in the distance the gigantic harrows breaking up the stubble after the harvest. A derisory attempt to reinject organic matter into a soil long since exhausted and in any case promised to concrete. As well give mouth-to-mouth to a corpse.
The uprooting of hedges during the land consolidation operations of the sixties, to ease the passage of tractors over the enlarged surfaces of the farms, was today unanimously regarded as a considerable error, responsible for floods and landslides. Even the most productivist of the AgroParisTech teachers agreed on the major role hedges played in ensuring biodiversity.
Contrary to their apprehensions, Arthur and Anne had formed sincere friendships in the village, as equals, free of all the calculations the city imposes. Friendships of mutual aid, where each gives what they can. For to choose the smallest material, to repair the smallest tool, to prepare the smallest crop, they were constantly in search of help and advice. Never during their studies had they made such an intellectual effort, borrowing from every domain of knowledge and demanding perpetual adaptation to the needs of DIY.
Kevin had already learned to know this very Parisian character: an executive with a linear career, an agile but narrow mind; an anonymous stoker of capitalism reaping only its crumbs, and compensating for the mediocrity of his trajectory with the conviction of being at the vanguard of social progress. Five-thousand-euro-a-month revolutionaries, they were the heralds of disruption, the pythias of corporate responsibility, the prophets of the world of tomorrow, always one innovation ahead. Where the general public was still discovering artificial intelligence, they were already ablaze for the quantum computer. By dint of subscribing to newsletters and attending conferences, they ended up acquiring a sample of references and quotations sufficient to fuel a dinner party.
The most persevering had spent a few weeks of disconnected retreat elaborating their own theory of the universe, a hundred or so pages alas too innovative to interest publishers, and which led them to develop one final virtue: modesty. Suffice to say that all this unrecognised genius could not long be wasted discussing a sixty-thousand-euro loan for vermicomposting.
You think I enjoy finding myself with those guys? Mummy-and-Daddy forked out thirty grand and they think they're stars. Half the guys in suits, the girls in heels like in the eighties. All incredibly uptight. And when they let loose at parties, they vomit everywhere.
...
He heard about the parties to which he was not invited, the WhatsApp threads no one had thought to add him to, the rumours whose protagonists he did not even know. No one showed the slightest animosity towards him. They merely ignored him politely. In the great game of who-will-become-a-millionaire-first, he was not on the starting line. When he really had to be referred to, they said "the farm boy" or "the scholarship kid". He took no offence. He had no desire to become a millionaire.
How many good guys had supplied the regiments of idiots thanks to whom peasants had been enslaved with impunity, witches burned, Black people chained, workers exploited, Jews exterminated and indigenous peoples driven out? Good guys are criminals who won't own up to it.
— I still don't see how you'll earn your crust. With a few hectares of no-till...
— Next year, we'll be 25.
— And so?
— We'll be able to go on welfare.
— Fine ambition.
— I'd rather be paid by society to do good to the living world than be paid by a company to destroy it.
The State had ruined and humiliated him. He was not now going to pay it a single centime. Like his hero David Thoreau, who refused to pay his taxes to a slave-holding federal State, Arthur did not want to contribute to the vast machine of citizen surveillance and soil destruction. Civil servants were in his eyes collaborators of agro-industry, in league with the FNSEA. He was certainly not going to pay their salaries.
Only Maria still tried to reason with Arthur. She defended social democracy. Whimpered about public services, solidarity, citizen participation, the whole classic conceptual soup of reformist-left academics. Arthur could no longer bear these discussions. He recognised neither the Republic, a screen for the interests of the ruling class, nor the so-called public services, mere bait for controlling the population.
— In our day and age, Arthur exploded, I'm accused of having planted a hedge! He's the one who should be convicted for exterminating the soil!
— Justice serves the interests of the polluters. The State destroys that on which it is founded. This society is rotten! Founded on the exploitation of man and nature, it will either be overthrown by man or annihilated by nature.
Already divorced, she wanted to hear no more of love and was considering, in a few years, using a surrogate mother to raise a child — or rather to have it raised by Filipino babysitters, the human-species equivalent of Mexican dog walkers.
He conferred with environmental defence associations that suspected him of serving the industrialists' greenwashing and wondered about the welfare of the earthworms.
He provided the introductory training for a horde of communicators, project officers, marketing specialists, public relations managers, chief operating officers and other blatherers who had joined Veritas and had never seen an earthworm in their lives.
Kevin found in the Parisian elite a form of camaraderie long vanished from the countryside where he had grown up — a mutual aid all the warmer because, deep down, nobody needed anything.
— The French don't know how lucky they are.
— They have everything and they grumble.
— They hate change.
— Every time they're offered an intelligent reform, they bring the country to a standstill. Kevin had no firm opinion on strikes. His parents had never taken part in the slightest social movement. Without stable employment, they felt in no way concerned by wage rises or the legal retirement age. They knew they were poor and would remain so. For them, going on strike represented a luxury definitively out of reach, reserved for those who had a permanent contract, owned their own house and went on holiday to Spain in August.
He now knew how the Sciences Po alumni networks worked. Anne could not have had to search very long to find a well-paid job requiring no particular skills.
He understood her reasons well and did not think of judging her. It was she who lost herself in justifications.
Granted. Let us not even think of the trucks' emissions, the construction of access roads, the paving over of soil. Let us not even attempt to invert the reasoning by asking whether we could not instead reduce our waste.
He had quickly deserted the traditional unions, including the toughest, which under the guise of changing the world rolled over at the first pay rise. He had attended the meetings of a few anti-capitalist parties, only to realise that they wanted to take power, not abolish it. He would gladly have joined a ZAD if there had been one in the region. Alas, the Norman pastures hardly predisposed one to revolution. He had thought of the black blocs of Caen, but the prospect of finding himself with an iron bar in his hands terrified him. He had then got involved in countless eco-anarchist grouplets. Those he had not left of his own accord had dissolved themselves after violent internal disputes. Salim had concluded that the propensity to split was inversely proportional to real capacity for influence.
France, European champion of incineration. One tonne of CO2 emitted per tonne of waste burned.
Showing an ugly mug to the eco-bobos, readers of Libé, who had never set foot in the countryside. Confronting them with their unbearable hypocrisy.
The press had already moved on to the next buzz: the private-jet holidays of the Minister of Ecology, who claimed it was the only way to "be able to get back to Paris at any moment".
We believe that representative democracy is not capable of making the necessary break. Voters are alienated by growth. The conscious expression of their will is thwarted by the incessant titillation of their desires. Their political lion's skin, as Marx said, is inhabited by their consumer flesh. They say we must slow down but they buy the latest phone. Oil is the opium of the people.
The last generation able to burn fossils in relative insouciance, to dance until the end of the party.
Those who live in cities and work in glass offices. And then those who go on TV to explain to us what we should think. All of them stroll about in the open air making sentences. They believe that without them, the world would stop turning. But the truth is that without us, they would have nothing to eat.
That land, my friends, is gold. I am convinced the land will once again become the centre of the economy. Not tomorrow: in 5 years, 10 years perhaps. No matter — thanks to all the cretins bringing us in millions by playing with data, we can invest for the long term. The physiocrats of the 18th century were right: all value ultimately comes from agriculture.
When there is no more energy, when the supply chains are broken and the telecommunications networks cut, when the cars have neither petrol nor battery, what will people think about? Posting an outraged comment on their dead screens? No.
They will think about surviving — the common lot of humanity before the industrial revolution. They will flee the cities like rats. They will want land. Land to live on and to feed themselves.
Hurry up and wipe your plates, carry on with your sterile little debates about finance and politics, enjoy it! Down to the last drop! It's nearly over, the bullshit of the bastards! You'll remember your meals at Costes when you're crawling along the roads. And I will remember you when you come begging me for bread and water.
HUMUS - Gaspard Koenig (in French, no English edition yet)
AQUA - Gaspard Koenig (in French, no English edition yet)