Flamant, Women’s Land. Construction d’une utopie: Oregon, États-Unis, 1970–2010 (Donnemarie-Dontilly: Éditions iXe, 2015)
You say that there are no words to describe these times, you say that they do not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or if necessary, invent.
Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969)
Acknowledgements
There are paradoxes we would like to do without: writing about the absolute need for nature, meaning and connection … while spending long days immersed in books and in front of a screen, cutting off the presence of human and non-human beings who matter.
We feel an immense gratitude to our companions, Élise, Stéphanie and Marine, and for our children, for having understood and accepted this for many weeks, and especially during this tough final marathon. All your love, and ours, is also found in this book! (We know that’s not much comfort.)
At the end of this adventure, we would like to thank Sophie Lhuillier and Christophe Bonneuil, for your willingness to take risks and your kindness, as well as the entire Seuil team for your understanding and your patience. We are delighted to walk at your side!
A huge thank you to Dominique Bourg and Cyril Dion for the foreword and afterword, for your presence and your authenticity. Thanks also to both of you for proofreading, as well as to Nicolas Haeringer, Élise Monette, Typhaine Domercq and Denys Chalumeau, for critical and encouraging comments during the writing.
We send our warm thanks to the intrepid cowgirl Charlotte de Mévius, as well as to Hugues Dorzée from the magazine Imagine demain le monde and Alexandre Penasse from the journal Kairos, for your trust and support throughout these years.
Thanks to you, brothers and sisters who made the mycelium grow: Agnes, Aline, Claire, Clément, Corinne, Étienne, Helena, Josué, Laurent L., Laurent R., Lise, Marine S., Michel-Maxime, Muriel, Nathéa, Raphaël, Sébastien, Tylie, Valérie-Azul, Vincent and many other filaments and spores. Also to you, our families and neighbours, Nelly and Michel, Chantal and Pierre, Nicole and Michel, Brigitte and Philippe, Typhaine and Sam, Yannick and Virginie, Monique, Benoît and Caroline, Anne and Jean-Martin, Luc, Marc Pier, Sébastien and Corentin, for help, in-flight refuelling and encouragement.
Maxi-admiration and ultra-gratitude for daring, sensitivity and inspiration: Zoé Alowan, Jean Claude Ameisen, Jean-Pierre Andrevon, Margaret Atwood, Carolyn Baker, Janine Benyus, Dominique Bourg, Paul Chefurka, Yves Cochet, François Couplan, Ashlee Cunsolo, Alain Damasio, Philippe Descola, Vinciane Despret, Cyril Dion, Michel-Maxime Egger, Arturo Escobar, Christophe Fauré, Monica Gagliano, Rachel and Antoine (Geb-nout), Brian Goodwin, John Michael Greer, Émilie Hache, Marc Halévy, Stephan Harding, Geneen Haugen, Jean Hegland, Émilie Hermant, Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyer, Xavier Hulhoven, Bill Kauth, Paul Kingsnorth, Maja Kooistra, Bruno Latour, Charles-Maxence Layet, Ursula Le Guin, Jacques Lucas, Joanna Macy, David Manise, Dennis and Donella Meadows, Edgar Morin, Baptiste Morizot, Marisa Ortolan, Kim Pasche, Bill Plotkin, André Ruwet, Suzanne Simard, Agnès Sinai, Rebecca Solnit, Starhawk, Isabelle Stengers, Valérie-Azul Thomé, Bruno Tracq, Patrick Van Eersel, Patrick Viveret, Francis Weller, Edward O. Wilson, not to mention the precious punk blue tits whose language has finally been deciphered by that fine diplomat and interpreter Alessandro Pignocchi (and one of which ended up perched on the cover of the original French edition).
Thanks to the pessimists-plus and optimists-plus of the social networks, as well as countless collapsonauts who have written touching and often overwhelming messages over the past three years; you have given us immense courage! We haven’t given up on answering you … before the collapse.
Special mention to the modest genius of an Earth-Dweller who wrote on the walls the beautiful sentence (spotted in 2010 at the University of Nanterre) which served us as title: Une autre fin du monde est possible…. We take this opportunity to make an appeal to the person who sent us the photo … please get in touch, for the next version of these thanks.
Finally, thank you to the sacred feminine, to magic, to the witches, to the Shambhala warriors, the New Warriors, to the spirits of the places that have given us hospitality while we were writing, and to all the other-than-humans who amaze us, who give us life and who are relying on us.
Foreword
I remember something I once read, though I cannot recall where. We are in Gallo-Roman Provence, towards the end of the fourth century. A patrician, at the head of a vast estate, boasts of the power of Rome. The same archaeological excavations reveal that shortly after its owner wrote about his pride in belonging to the Empire, the villa and its inhabitants were victims of a barbaric incursion. It seems that the assailants feasted on the spot and celebrated their crime by drinking out of the skull of the former master of the estate. Perhaps it is this sinister side of this story that prevents me from remembering where I read it.
Whether that is the case or not, the elites of that time, like those of today, displayed a mixture of arrogance, naivety and crude cynicism. Like today, the end of the Empire saw a dramatic rise in inequality. We can imagine that after centuries of the Pax Romana, it must have been difficult to imagine anything like the end of the Empire. It’s equally difficult for us to admit that after centuries of ‘progress’, thermo-industrial civilization and its high growth rates could fall apart.
If you have opened this book, you have probably had some intuition of such a collapse. So have I, and I am convinced, too, that the moral and political manifestations of our movement towards collapse can already be seen and felt around us. For several years, we have seen the rise of political leaders with much the same psychological profile, who gain power by skilfully stirring up and playing on fear and hatred. Repellent and pretentious, dishonest and depraved, destroying one after the other the barriers, physical as well as moral, that protect his compatriots from global violence, Trump is the epitome of these new ruling elites. Many of these politicians have been elected and have won the admiration of vast numbers of people. As this shows, the catastrophe, and the movement that carries it forward, has a moral nature before it takes physical form. As in Serge Reggiani’s song, the wolves, all too human, were able to enter Paris because they were already there. Human fellow-feeling had already deserted the city.1 Moral violence precedes and feeds physical violence, but above all it blinds us and disarms us in the face of the physical threats which signal our entry into the Anthropocene.
This is precisely why this book by Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens and Gauthier Chapelle is so important. The industrial ‘party’ will soon be over. A number of vital issues, under whatever names, will again take centre stage. How this present world ends, and even more what new worlds it will give birth to, will depend very much on the connections which we are able to weave and on how we succeed in imagining our immediate future. In this respect, this book is very valuable. It is not a treatise of ‘collapsology’, like Pablo and Raphaël’s first book,2 but a book of ‘collapsosophy’. It does not aim to convince us of a probable collapse – an exercise which has already been accomplished – but to prepare us internally to face it, and in a way to go beyond it, by preparing from now on for the world that is to come, the world that we would choose to rebuild, on new principles, among the other worlds that might take shape.
Our approach to reality has driven its extreme love of the one-dimensional, its obstinate simple-mindedness, to the point of destruction. Our Paradise here on earth was to be built purely through progress (but what kind of progress?), science (that of Bayer-Monsanto and its ‘science-based’ approaches?), the quantitative, GDP, growth, competitiveness, efficiency, mastery of the material world (on what scale and for how long?), capitalism, freedom (what kind of freedom?
