Tribune. The ecological crisis is clear. The conjunction of the social crisis and the ecological crisis is even more so. The thought on this conjunction suffers, for its part, from a face-to-face as sterile conceptually as it is strategically hopeless.
On the one hand, the rhetoric and opportunities for inclusive green economic growth, even for green finance, are multiplying by emptying the ecological message of its subversive reach. We are led to believe in the market’s capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, protect biodiversity, reduce pollution, and save water, as soon as the market is allowed to set prices that are supposed to lead to best possible condition of the planet.
A philosophical arc
Meanwhile, speculation is in full swing on the price of raw materials, the “valuation of ecosystems” becomes a new El Dorado, water a financial asset, while the UN looks at the “value of water” , and the financiers are happy that the year 2021 is presented as “the year of green bonds”. Full frame to castigate “punitive ecology”, orchestrate a permanent “greenwashing” or delegitimize the steps for the climate.
On the other hand, a philosophical arc is forged which intends to challenge any vision which does not extend to all the material elements of the planet, if not of the universe, the character of “living”. Thus, a forum signed by nearly 70 personalities and institutions from philosophy, anthropology, science or politics, intends “Think of glaciers as actors in a world we inhabit together” (The world, May 6, 2021).
If it was really and only “Reinventing forms of relationship with the mountain”, if the stake was only to break with a “Simple relation of utilitarianism”, and, in this case, to refuse the installation of a new section of cable car in the Alpine massif, a new avatar of a “great useless project”, we would adhere completely without any restriction.
But the authors of this forum go much further than imagining new practices that make pastoralism compatible with a gentle mountain practice.
For them, it is necessary to consider the glaciers in the process of ” die “ like the ” living beings “ who are “Full-fledged actors”.
Here must begin a discussion which it would be dangerous to believe closed. The term “actor” needs to be questioned. If glaciers, oceans are the “Full-fledged actors” that the authors of the tribune claim, it means that they think their action, that they are animated by an intentionality, neither more nor less than the human beings who are thinking about them.
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