Chronic. In her latest book, written with Rebecca Stefoff, Overcome climate and social injustice (Actes Sud, April 2021, 304 p., € 18.80), essayist Naomi Klein tells how, on the sidelines of a shoot, she introduced her barely old son Toma to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef of 4 years. Toma had just learned to swim and, when he dived with his mom, he saw, in amazement, a world teeming with life and exploding with color. Underwater, he came across a sea cucumber, a turtle and even “Nemo”, the little orange and white fish popularized by Pixar studios.
At the same time that she felt immense joy in sharing all this with her son, Naomi Klein, who, as a child, had also been introduced to the beauties of ocean life by her father, began to experience great sadness in thinking about what Toma’s future would be like. “That night, after putting him to bed in our hotel room, I whispered in his ear: “Today you have discovered the world that is hidden under the surface of the sea.” He looked up at me, and I understood from his lightening face how happy he was. He answered me : “I saw it.” And to my joy to hear these words was mixed with immense sorrow, because I knew that at the moment when he discovered the beauty of this world, this beauty was exhausted ”, writes the essayist, aware that due to global warming, vast areas of this coral reef are already dead or dying.
Atlantis of flakes
The extremely ambivalent feeling described here by Naomi Klein, a sort of parental solastalgia (eco-anxiety), I have also experienced on numerous occasions. Whenever it happened to me to find myself in a snowy landscape with my children, I could not help but think that tomorrow, all this would perhaps be only a distant memory, that ‘We might already be here, unknowingly, shaking ourselves in the heart of an Atlantis of flakes.
During the last school holidays, with my eldest son, we stumbled across a documentary rebroadcast on Francetvinfo entitled “When industrialization transforms the face of French forests”. The point was relatively clear: behind the ambition displayed by the government of “Replant 50 million trees” Another reality emerges, much more brutal, where various sylvan biotopes are replaced by easily exploitable coniferous monocultures, where the soils are ransacked by the passage of giant harvesters, where industrial logic is applied to living things … I don’t know if he captured everything from the documentary, but seeing these images of ratibois forests, my son was quite annoyed: “Why are they doing this, is it silly?” “
Frankly, what to answer to this question? “Yes, son, adults sometimes seem totally dumb and suicidal. Come on, brush your teeth, go to bed and have sweet dreams of primary forests. “ This little moment spent together in front of this documentary suddenly made me feel a reality that I had not integrated: if adults methodically prepare for future generations an uninhabitable world, it is because they know very well that the announced catastrophe will not strike indefinitely, as some will suffer more than others from this new form of injustice.
What is torn from the child is not the added value of his work (this lucky guy is still at school), but the legitimate right to live in a hospitable world.
“And all too often the first and foremost victims of the evils caused by the climate crisis are the most disadvantaged: the poor, people of color and indigenous people”, underlines Naomi Klein. More violently subject to the vagaries of the climate than others because they do not have the means to protect themselves, these vulnerable categories constitute what Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz have called a “Geosocial class” or “Geoclass”.
“Many members of this geoclass are not exploited in the classic Marxist sense of the term (where the exploited are those who work for the holders of the means of production who monopolize the distribution of resources): if they are “exploited”, it is with regard to their conditions of subsistence in a given territory (access or not to drinking water, to clean air, sanitary conditions, level of safety, etc.) ”, writes the philosopher Slavoj Zizek in his essay Into the viral storm (South Act, 2020). Because he is the one whose future has been obliterated, shamelessly squandering the ecosystem capital from which he could have benefited, the child constitutes the absolute of the “geoproletaire”.
What is torn from him is not the added value of his work (this lucky guy is still at school), but the legitimate right to live in a hospitable world. Made possible by irresponsible, selfish or cynical adults, this unprecedented situation in history establishes, in fact, the child as a political subject with no longer a knife but a Pom’Potes between the teeth. Matching the belly ball. According to a 2015 Ipsos poll, 87% of children aged 8 to 11 believe that adults are not doing enough to protect the environment.
The age of extreme worry
It was while watching documentaries on the extinction of species and the melting of ice that, at the age of 8, Greta Thunberg grasped the threats to the future of her generation and initiated the climate strikes. , one of the slogans of which is: “When I grow up, I would like to be alive”. At the time of the “geoproletariat”, childhood is no longer this age of recklessness, but the age of extreme concern. Faced with climate inaction from governments, in September 2019, 16 young people from 8 to 17 years old have taken legal action against five polluting states (France, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey), for “infringement of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child”.
But, while we blithely trash the planet on which he will live tomorrow, we often deny this young activist the right to rebel, on the grounds that he is supposedly… immature. When Greta Thunberg came to the National Assembly in 2019, right-wing deputies boycotted the intervention of the young Swedish braid, judging that her young age was a disqualifying factor. “I respect freedom of thought… but don’t count on me to applaud a prophetess in shorts”, had then plastron on Twitter Julien Aubert, elected Les Républicains (LR) of Vaucluse. Faced with so much contempt, once you have finished your snack, “geo-proletarians” of all countries, unite!