Chronic. In his song Kiki, Julien Doré evokes his guilt of being an adult leaving children a devastated and deadly world: “You know, it’s shame / That serves as my paper / I drew your grave / Before you even rocked. “ All the album Loved is in unison with this dark mood, between endangered species, rising oceans, melting ice. A few stanzas later, the ex-troubadour of “Nouvelle Star” balances his club argument, in an attempt to clear himself from the young generation: “You’ll have to forgive / We were tired. “
Faced with the gravity of the current situation, many of us, on our small scale, actually feel a form of desolation, weariness, fatigue. If we cannot say too much precisely how we got there, what is certain is that it is increasingly difficult to escape the observation of the surrounding devastation. For that, you don’t need to have had your barbecue party disrupted by a mega-fire or torrential rains. It is also in the banality of its manifestations that the ecocidal drive is revealed in broad daylight.
Inescapable taint
An example. This summer, with my children, we went to a small river in the Aragonese Pyrenees (Spain), where we have been going every summer for years. Crisp, fresh water, arid mountains reminiscent of a western setting. The spot, which was, a few years ago, confidential and almost Edenic, has unfortunately become overcrowded. When we arrive, a family gets up to leave, pouring Mother Nature their scraps of abandoned plastic forks.
All over the area, the waves of summer visitors defecated massively between the prickly shrubs. Aluminum soda cans, plastic straw wrappers, used masks complete this picture where the savage (of the place) disputes it with the savagery (of the temporary occupant). Little consolation: my eldest son harpooned a smartwatch at the bottom of the torrent, where it would have made more sense to flush out a trout. But, despite this discovery, what dominates after this day at the water’s edge is the feeling of an inevitable taint of our habitat, of a “becoming-trash” which, we do not really know why, imposes itself as a fatality.
“The world might be better without us humans”, repeated my 10 year old son on the way home, outraged by what he had seen. Hard, hard to hear a kid inaugurate so young his first misanthropic inclinations. But how to prove him wrong? To reassure ourselves, we could say, of course, that it is the others who make dirt, and that we have nothing to do with it. It would be delusional. During our outfit, a member of our group lost a water activity shoe in the torrent, which swelled the flow of garbage piling up there. We drove there and took part in the global warming. On the way back, we bought vacuum-packed meat and octopus, ice cream too, the wrappers of which may one day land in the sea.
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