The urgency to slow down
In a world of finite resources, an imaginary vision where our means of transport, symbols of infinite growth and excessive energy consumption would become beneficial P.A., “Augmented Planters” at the time of I.A. “Augmented Indigence”.
I don’t know about you but I thought “naively” that the Covid-19 would allow us to glimpse a new world but in view of the planes in the sky at the time of writing, the number of engine’s vehicles covering the song of birds, the sending of rocket in space and the governmental recommendations of these last days across the planet (and more particularly in France), one can quite affirm that the frenetic rhythm of yesterday is reclaiming “naturally” its place to the detriment of biodiversity and our health.
But my words are probably influenced by the vision of the doe and other myriad of birds back under our windows during confinement, (or rather under house arrest).
For long weeks and like many of us, I fantasized about a more reasonable, calmer, more harmonious world where our means of transport would literally become “augmented planters”, a world where to move an 80kg body thanks to a 2-ton car would only be a distant bad memory…
At a time when humanity is increasing its environmental debt at an ever-increasing rate, postponing actions to combat global warming will lead to far more dramatic phenomena in the future than the only Covid-19 pandemic, a very small wave compared to the tsunami that awaits us.
Far from being an individualistic morality about frugality, sobriety and resilience, these few photographic montages rather aim to create a sort of “asceticism by bicycle” (or on foot according to preferences) and to question our relationship to mobility and to the time in a world where the destruction of the animal and vegetable kingdom is on the way to becoming a simple remembrance part of our humanity.
What is the point of cycling, sorting out your waste and reducing your energy consumption when the use of fossil fuels is still largely subsidized and represented, when their extraction always feeds the production apparatus and the GDP figures by growth (green growth included)?
Covid further revealed the vulnerability of our civilization and the weaknesses associated with the liberal model on which we depend.
The time has undoubtedly come to change the way we think about our displacements, our consumption of resources and more generally our relationship with nature and our physical relationship with the passage of time. The time has undoubtedly come to put in place a necessary break with the productivist schema of industry and the dictate of world finance shot with algorithms.
Find a more logical rhythm of life and systems of thought, a fairer socio-economic structure, a more reasonable general pace …
Our productions have become physically and socially unsustainable and our machines used to move, extract and conquer territories (physical and psychological geography) are partly the symbols of this collective drift.
But how can such an evolution, a social and individual overhaul, be made acceptable? And by what means?
The answers are multiple and we collectively hold them, but the action will probably have to start with a “voluntary global decrease”.
Which will be preferable to an “overall decrease suffered” by an inaction which will generate a much more violent shock to manage in the “very near” future.
