is the beautiful thing about the Grand Veymont, whose steep rock face dominates the celebrated Mont Aiguille. They all have to deal with issues of subsistence in the very simple sense that they must learn to stay alive. So I can understand how the engineers of the city of Prague are also keen to maintain Charles Bridge, jewel of the city, through regular inspections and numerous facelifts; how it is indeed the same kind of concerns that lead Baptiste Morizot to bring together wolves, sheep, dairy farmers, hunters and organic farmers around the ASPAS nature reserve in the Vercors; how it is indeed also through subtle inventions that the famous virus to whom we owe lockdown keeps on recombining so as to last a bit longer and spread further from mouth to mouth. What we can say of Earth is that it is the connection, association, overlapping, combination of all those who have subsistence and engendering concerns. An issue the Samsa family obviously simplified somewhat when Grete had the cruelty to ask: ‘How do we get rid of it?’ – speaking of her dear insect-brother …
I see, then, that I could explore this generational conflict more if I agreed to follow much further and, above all, for a much longer time, the lists of those who have engendering concerns. It actually turns out that it’s in no way by chance that those agents always feel there’s a family resemblance between them. That’s because every existing being corresponds, step by step, to an invention, the specialists say a ‘branch’, that relates to a predecessor and to a successor; a small difference, that enables us to construct, again step by step, something like a genealogy, a family tree, often bushy, at times incomplete, that allows every one of us to go back, as they say, to their beginnings, just as a salmon goes back upriver, then upstream, then finally to the waterhole where it was born.
Urbanites have learnt to draw up their family trees; urbanists can tell you [vous], block by block, about the evolution – that’s the word sometimes used – of their city. When they’re in the country, a stone’s throw from Saint-Agnan, geologists can do the same with the history – another word often used – of the sediments of the Vercors. And if you’re lucky enough to walk around there with a botanist, he’ll do the same for the sociology of the mountain plants that make the ‘Strict Nature Reserve’ at the foot of the Grand Veymont heavy with scent; and if Anne-Christine Taylor comes and joins you, she’ll tell you instead about the cross-geneses of the wonderful Achuar gardens. The story will be more disturbing, more ancient, still more bushy, if you add a bacteriologist who reads Lynn Margulis to the walk, as he will take you to where the protists are and the archaea and introduce you to the feats of their combinations. But if you lose the thread of the story, you can always go back to more recent times with a visit to the excellent Musée de la Préhistoire (just below the Musée de la Résistance), in Vassieux-en-Vercors. This will allow you to follow other threads that connect the story of the silexes, pollens and silex cutters whose magnificent blades were exported to all of prehistoric Europe. You’ll be amazed at each stage of these geneses, but you’ll never lose sight of the fact that it’s about solving problems that are, after all, familiar to you. Locked-down, yes, but at home …
Little by little, we see that the word ‘Earth’ doesn’t refer to one planet among others according to the old positioning system, as if it were a name common to numerous celestial bodies. It’s a proper noun that gathers together all existing beings. But that’s just it: they are never gathered together into a whole – they have a family resemblance because they have a common origin and have spread, spilled over, mixed, overlapped, just about everywhere, transforming everything from top to bottom, incessantly repairing their initial conditions with their successive inventions. It turns out that every terrestrial recognises in his predecessors those who have created the conditions of liveability that he benefits from – Prague for the Samsa family, the anthill for the ant, the forest for the trees, the sea for the algae, their gardens for the Achuar – and that he expects to have to look after his successors. ‘Just about everywhere’ means as far as terrestrials have been able to extend and share their unique experience – but no further.
‘Earth’, then, is the term that comprises the agents – what biologists call ‘living organisms’ – as well as the effect of their actions, their niche if you like, all the traces they leave in passing, the external skeleton as well as the internal one, the termitaria as well as termites. Sébastien Dutreuil suggests we stick a capital on ‘Life’ to include living things and all they have transformed over the course of time, with the sea, mountains, soil and atmosphere included in a single line. If ‘life’ in small letters is a common noun that we hope to find just about everywhere in the Universe, ‘Life’ would be a proper noun designating this Earth and its so very particular organisation. But that would run the risk of introducing a new misunderstanding since the word ‘living’ is so much associated with the word ‘organism’. Happily, to avoid confusing planet earth with a small e, common noun, and Earth with a big E, proper noun, I have up my sleeve a technical and scholarly noun, taken as so often from the Greek: Gaia, which happens also to be, for better or for worse, the name of a particularly fertile mythological figure. We won’t say, then, that terrestrials are on earth, common noun, but that they are with Earth or Gaia, proper nouns.
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