*** INES TREPAN: Biodiversité : quand les politiques européennes menacent le Vivant. Connaître la nature pour mieux légiférer. Editions Yves Michel (5 allée du Torrent, F-05000 Gap. Tel: (33-4) 92655224 – fax: 92650879 – Email: contact@souffledor.fr – Internet: http://www.yvesmichel.org ). « Société civile » series. 2017, 366 pp., 22 €. ISBN 978-2-36429-096-9.
There are books that are hard to take insofar as they force us to face reality is it really is. Is man currently destroying the planet that sustains and surrounds him? Inès Trépant has no doubts about this for a second and in this book she denounces the harmful role played by the European Union institutions in the sacrifice of the living on the altar of economic growth, no less! According to Professor Olivier De Schutter (Université catholique de Louvain) in his preface, she is quite right and he concurs that after man tamed nature, “in order to benefit” from the treaty, “the basis of a logic of quantitative or so-called productivist growth literally means in the long-term that the soil will give way beneath our feet”. This academic was actually the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food and since 2015 has been a member of the UN Committee of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It might therefore be worthwhile paying attention to the warning he sounds in this publication.
Inès Trépan is a political counsellor at the European Parliament’s development committee and her convictions push much further than the customary politically correct niceties. In her introduction she makes the following accusation, “in Europe, the frenetic pace in which different species are being destroyed is anchored in a European economic model that is intrinsically unsustainable and in the blatant absence of an holistic approach by the institutions to prevent this loss”. It has to be said that she backs up her indictment (in his preface De Schutter that this is done through “a mixture of investigative journalism and scientific study”) by way of analysing several European mechanisms, which do not get off lightly from her critical evaluation. First of all, there is the question of the different spirals that are leading genetic diversity to disaster along with the complicity of the Union, “the official European catalogue” of agricultural seeds and it is therefore accused by the author of being “an instrument at the service of the agri-food industry”, whereas agricultural biodiversity, on the contrary, requires a kind of “seed liberation”. There is obviously also, “the expropriation of the living” through the use of GMOs and on this level the European Commission is the “industry’s Trojan horse”. In this litany there is also the “planetary cul-de-sac” of biofuels “the mirage” of the bio-economy and the “victory of death” assured by the use of pesticides, without even counting the “deadly dose imposed on biodiversity” by chemical fertilisers in this hour of victory for the “NPK mentality” and its combination of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium that is now the basis of all crop foods... Inès Trépant therefore provides a methodology to highlight the destruction provoked by industrial agriculture that with each increase in per hectare yield nature is further destroyed.
Professor De Schutter explains that the author’s explanation goes beyond an exclusively economic domain and successfully sheds light on, “a fundamental contradiction between two ways of conceiving the relationship between environmental and economic logic”.
Inès Trépant considers that European institutions have accepted the rules of the game to sacrifice everything upon it, including the climate, if she is to believed, in this “macabre dance” “in gestation”. She believes that the biggest mistake committed by the European Union stems from its inability to see that its economic model, the fruit of neoliberal ideology, is based on “the paradigm of unlimited growth” and is therefore “destroying the planetary balance”. The Union’s refusal to accept the evidence also means that it is proceeding in the “pillage of nature at a rate that is faster than technological innovation”, which ultimately only serves the interests of the few. This is why she makes a heartfelt appeal for, “a genuine Copernican revolution in our mindsets in an effort to put biodiversity back at the heart of the European economic project and not on its periphery”. It is far from certain that her appeal will be get the hearing it deserves. Michel Theys
*** PAUL JORION: Le dernier qui s’en va éteint la lumière. Essai sur l’extinction de l’humanité. Librairie Arthème Fayard / Pluriel (13 rue de Montparnasse, F-75006 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 45498200 – Email: info-fayard@editions-fayard.fr – Internet: http://www.fayard.fr ). « Pluriel » series. 2017, 283 pp. €9. ISBN 978-2-8185-0529-8.
The author presents this essay as “an informal monologue” that is not exactly cheerful stuff and could indeed lead to a blinding depression or at least bring us to our knees. This is what Paul Jorion himself announced with the sub-prime crisis and he is again adopting the garb of the prophet in these pages with a more terrible and fundamental warning, “If we continue in the same direction, the precipice is right in front of us and will effectively mean the end of the human race” by the end of this century or the beginning of the next. All of the ideas he expresses seek to demonstrate why humanity is not equipped to effectively tackle the extinction facing it, “in the space of two or three generations (according to the calculations made by physicists, chemists and palaeontologists, etc.)”. He claims that humanity is confronting an unprecedented challenge, which it does not want to meet as long as it, or rather the elites of the world, benefit from the situation. He breaks this challenge down into a single… basic problem created by several different layers that have superimposed themselves on it into a single and monstrous whole: first and foremost, there is environmental crisis stemming from the fact that, “man has until now behaved like a lemming: invading the earth without the slightest concern about using it sustainability or renewably in the world around him”. This is followed by the “complex crisis” in which we, “entrust our decision-making to computers, while jobs disappear due to our replacement by machines in the shape of robots and software”. Finally, there is the economic and financial crisis, due to the fact that our system is a gigantic “Machine that concentrates wealth” within its core. Dealing at length with the economic and financial world, the author provides a critical focus on the intrigues and treachery committed in the name of the golden goose and ultra-liberalism, which has successfully placed the political world under its control since Reagan and Thatcher set the ball rolling. “L’Europe des marchands” (A Europe of Traders) is also subject to the author’s critique. The author is an anthropologist and sociologist by training and in much of the rest of the publication, he speaks in this perspective and gives us a lot more to think about regarding the destiny of man. The following quotation further backs up the message he addresses to the public at large, “If we do not change direction and blithely accept our decerebration, scheming and voluntary servitude, despite the fact that this brings nothing to us but the crumbs and if you, our representatives continue with your blinkered electoralism, then it is indeed the final curtain and we have arrived at the end because the show is now over” and soon there will only be robots and smart machines to applaud this finale… (MT)
*** GIORGOS VELEGRAKIS, HARIS KONSTANDATOS, KOSTIS HATZIMICHALIS (Editors): L'écologie politique. Huit contributions au débat grec. Editions Nissos (14 rue Sarri, GR-10553 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3250058 – fax: 3250058 – Email: info@nissos.gr – Internet: http://www.nissos.gr ). 2017, 158 pp. €6. ISBN 978-960-589-054-4.
Political ecology is developing in a very wide range of areas and merges a theoretical and philosophical analysis of the relationship between society and nature, reflections regarding the unequal access to natural resources, the expropriation of common goods and environmental management policies. Notwithstanding the obligations imposed in this area, it also gets to grips with questions involving geopolitical rivalries concerning the exploitation of resources and the social movements that resist the way in which the world is going. It consciously politicises all of these questions and takes into account the areas in which the different social groups and regions win out or lose and continually poses the questions of, “Why, how and where?” This publication contains contributions from around 10 different university researchers supervised by three professors at the University of Harokopio in Athens. The book contains a number of suggestions formulated during a seminar organised by the geography department at this university three years ago on the theme of “environmental problems, the ecological crisis and the eco-socialist approach”. The different chapters focus on themes such as the political ecology in question, the natural environment as it stands, a brief examination of the relationship between humanity and the environment, the dialectic between “green” capture of nature and “non-green” capture in light of example from Greece and the United Kingdom, the limitations to the dominant ecology, the approach to conflict involving natural resources by the institutional economy, the eco-socialist approach to environmental problems and the ecological crisis. The book also contains an extremely comprehensive bibliography. (AKa)
*** Futuribles. L’anticipation au service de l’action. Futuribles Sarl (47 rue de Babylone, F-75007 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 53633770 – fax: 42226554 – Email: revue@futuribles.com – Internet: http://www.futuribles.com ). May-June 2017, No. 418, 122 pp. €22. Annual subscription: €115. ISBN 978-2-84387-431-4.
This edition of the French prospective journal edited by Hugues de Jouvenel contains an urgent appeal to “decarbonise” our economies. Alain Grandjean and Mireille Martini point out that the transition to a decarbonised economy has very little chance of taking shape as long as those who produce greenhouse gases do not have to pay for it. “The economic actors that benefit from a carbonised mode of production” will not change until there is “a price signal” for carbon that encourages them to change tack. The authors highlight the different possible mechanisms for taxing carbon and the way we could set carbon prices. They then look at this specific case of France in this context, followed by the European Union and its emissions trading scheme and subsequently reveal its imperfections and the need for further mechanisms to be introduced. They point out that effective technical solutions already exist and that, “they are barely more expensive than the current carbonised solutions”. Continuing on the same subject, the journal also examines the manifesto that appeared at the heart of the French presidential campaign, which called on the European states to, “begin launching policies that are able to bring greenhouse gas emissions as close to zero as possible by 2050”.
The other themes tackled in this issue include the need to rethink political life (Prefect Yannick Blanc directs his invitation to the French state but it is also valid for other areas of political life, given that non-governmental associations and charities form the bedrock of collective action and he argues that the time has come to accept a bottom-up approach) –, ideas for reforming social security in France, the way in which statistics measure the digital economy and is still controversial question of introducing a universal minimum wage or universal income. The traditional “European tribune”, in the shape of Jean-François Drevet, focuses on protectionist pressures currently threatening free trade, as well as Brexit, which is also one expression of these pressures. In the eyes of this former European official, it would be dangerous to succumb to this temptation but it is true that globalisation must prove its ability to display fairness at social and economic levels. (MT)
*** LOUISE CARLIER: Le cosmopolitisme, de la ville au politique. Enquête sur les mobilisations urbaines à Brussels. Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes / Peter Lang (41 av. Maurice, B-1050 Brussels. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 – fax: 3761727 – Email: brussels@peterlang.com et order@peterlang.com – Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). « Action publique » series, No. 14. 2016, 234 pp. €36, £29, $46.95. ISBN 978-2-87574-305-3.
This book is an extension of PhD research and adopts a sociological approach to the concept of cosmopolitanism. This concept now enjoys a very different level acceptance to the prevailing idea towards it in Kant’s mode of thinking because it can now be located, “at the heart of our democratic modernity and is full of the promises and demands … when it comes to putting it into practice”. Louise Carlier analyses the concept in the context of Brussels, a metropolitan city that is now the scene of, “globalised capitalism and those it tends to exclude and at a broader level, the contradictions and tensions dividing the contemporary world”. After examining cosmopolitanism from a sociological and philosophical point of view, the first part of her book provides a sociological approach to cosmopolitanism in a context of intellectual legacy bequeathed by Robert Ezra Park from the Chicago School, who attempted to combine an ecological and political approach to cosmopolitanism. The school of thought was then “Europeanised” by Isaac Joseph. The second part of the book provides an empirical approach and was developed on the basis of an investigation that sought to both measure and understand the urban changes that have shaped Brussels from the 1960s to the present day. Why Brussels? First of all, because since the beginning of the last century, this city (still not a region of the time) provided a home to both “the transnational class” and the “class of disadvantaged” according to the definition provided by Saskia Sassen, “the European official and asylum seeker, the international clientele and young immigrants” who are all very present in the city, despite the fact that the city has been “shaped by supra rather than intra-national movements” in a way that has influenced the forms that this cosmopolitanism has taken. Louise Carlier subsequently identifies the different models of cosmopolitanism where ecological and political dimensions are intertwined within it, as well as the principles of hospitality and citizenship. It is the history of meetings and attempts at adaptation are recounted and explained and this “European ghetto” is no less problematic than other places where other “foreigners” in the capital of Europe live... (PBo)