[Chronique] A well-known environmental activist in France, Camille Étienne published her first book with Editions du Seuil in 2023. An important work, particularly for finding meaning if we feel fear in the face of ecological crises.
This is a book that awakened something in me: For an ecological uprising. It is signed by Camille Étienne. This 25-year-old environmental activist mobilizes her social networks as tools of struggle, but she has also taken up her pen in bookstores. As a result, this is the book to absolutely read if you are looking for meaning about the place of ecology in your life.
Have you ever felt powerless in the face of the scale of climate change, its urgency, the impasse of political inaction? If so, you may be feeling fear. That’s my case. I am a science journalist, my role is to be very informed in order to inform: I have a lot of reasons to be anxious.
Being afraid of the ecological crisis is normal
Camille Étienne’s book does good without sparing us. He did me good without reassuring me. Because it does not distort reality: the well-documented work describes facts and concrete situations on the ecological crisis that we are experiencing. But the author takes us by surprise very early on by saying this: “ What if, to overcome helplessness, we had to rethink fear? Give it a place in the public debate? »
How to rethink this fear? By allowing it. Camille Étienne relates an anecdote: before going on a TV set, the producer asked her to “ don’t be too afraid “. If you are a science journalist, or mediator, or scientist, you know this phrase well. We are alarmistsof the catastrophists. But this phrase is actually internalized by everyone. It stifles our collective capacity to question and modify our relationship with the world.
One part of the book struck me: the one where Camille Etienne talks about her amazement at the need to prove that an ecological future is desirable. Ecology would be punitive, it would be necessary to “make people want” a livable future.
She writes : ” In what social narrative are we mired so that the only outcome that allows life is not desirable? However, it is an uninhabitable land that awaits us. And we should make escaping it desirable? This speaks to the madness in which we are kept. »
So perhaps we need to rehabilitate the plural: there is not only one possible world.
We can also listen to Pablo Servigne on this subject. He theorized collapsology, the theory of a collapse of industrial civilization. On France Culture 4 years ago he said that it is above all a matter of allowing yourself to think something else — extract from 17:48 :
To think about another world, Camille Etienne says it: no need for a click. It starts by giving space to our emotions. So I who was mired in a well-hidden eco-anxiety, I who feared to alarm too much, I say thank you to Camille Étienne for helping me to be afraid, because I know now that if we are afraid together, we also have a strength common, which can be transformed into mutual aid, and which can change everything.
Listen to Brave New World again on France Culture
This column is taken from the show The best of worlds, on France Culture. In this episode of November 17, 2023, François Saltiel received the British writer and artist James Bridle, for his work All the intelligences in the world. Also watch in replay on Twitch.
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