Breathable air, drinkable water, enough to eat, and human beings able to cooperate, to see one another, to dream together: such, for the economist Éloi Laurent, is a habitable planet. Is ours still one? A disrupted climate, a living world wearing away, finite resources: eleven voices of ecological thought take stock of an Earth that has entered the Anthropocene, the epoch we ourselves have shaped. Filmed in the middle of the pandemic, in a black studio where images of a damaged world pass by, the film turns the health crisis into a mirror. Rather than lining up solutions, it questions the economic system in which we live and the straitjackets of thought in which we seem to be stuck.
In the Sahel, with the vegetation gone through erosion and deforestation, the desert has advanced: the land there has become less habitable.
Scientists, activists, historians, economists, filmed one by one, facing the same cameras.The geographer Magali Reghezza-Zitt distinguishes inhabiting from occupying. Some territories will only be habitable for a time, or differently, and by others. The question, then, is not whether we can live anywhere, but what it costs to inhabit a place that is falling out of balance, and who will still be able to live there. Jean-Marc Jancovici gives the measure of it. The human being is a species that has succeeded too well: it eradicated its predators and then, thanks to fossil fuels, built itself “a titanic exoskeleton made of machines” to dig mines, raze forests, empty the oceans, on a planet whose diameter, for its part, has not changed. The bill will not wait for the end of the century. At 1.2 degrees of warming, the trouble is already here: giant fires in Siberia, in Australia, in California, and 20 to 30% of the planet’s corals are dead. At 3 degrees more, a third of humanity could be living in conditions close to those of the Sahara.
Africa’s desert regions are “already at the limit of habitability”, although they have contributed little to greenhouse gas emissions.
Coasts make up only 8% of the land surface, yet all the world’s great cities stand by the ocean; in France, the sea could rise by 2 metres by 2100.
For someone born in the 1940s, the world’s population has tripled within a single lifetime.We think we stand apart. The biologist Gilles Bœuf reminds us that we belong to the animal kingdom: we share a third of our DNA with micro-algae, two thirds with the banana, and a human body is at least half made of bacteria. Every attack on the living world is therefore an attack on ourselves. Since the 1970s, 68% of vertebrates have disappeared. And by destroying the habitats of wildlife, François Gemenne observes, we are drawing closer to it: zoonoses are multiplying, like Covid-19.
Warming is already the third cause of biodiversity loss, and species are disappearing faster than during the fifth mass extinction.
Climate change is still perceived as a threat that will “affect others before it affects us”.
Off Brittany, plankton is moving 47 kilometres further north each year, as the surface water warms.
In 2018, the potato harvest was cut by 40%. “For now, it’s no big deal, we’ve got oil, we import them from elsewhere.”We have entered the Anthropocene, and however often the warnings are repeated, we do not hear them. The film is shot as the virus locks the world down, and this setback becomes a mirror: a grain of sand was enough to jam the machine. Shocks strike the most vulnerable first, as the economist Éloi Laurent shows: the 2003 heatwave caused 15,000 deaths in France, 90% of them people over 65, often living alone. Our best shield would be “social density”, the very thing the pandemic took away from us. François Gemenne points out its limit: the health crisis will pass, whereas climate change is not a crisis but a deep and lasting transformation of our societies. “There will be no vaccine against climate change.” The historians trace the genesis of this new geological epoch. François Jarrige recounts the myth of dilution, from ever taller chimneys to waste dumped at sea. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz recalls that oil company scientists knew, as early as the 1970s, what CO2 would do to the climate: we did not blind ourselves, “some people blinded us”. As for the economy, steered by GDP alone, Éloi Laurent calls it “extraterrestrial”: it ignores the natural resources and the ecosystems on which our well-being depends.
At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, the archives are already full of lawsuits and petitions against the most polluting factories.
Coronavirus deaths overwhelmed emergency departments; those caused by air pollution remain “much more invisible”, because they are less epidemic.
Two thirds of the French wanted to use the health crisis to close the borders for good: the climate too could feed a turning inwards.What remains is to change the story. The technical world we inherit is not the height of rationality, as Jean-Baptiste Fressoz shows: early in the 20th century, the private car was seen as an aberration, and energy has never been through a transition, only additions, coal added to wood, oil to coal. Digital technology, which dreamed of itself as immaterial, needs pipes, metals and infrastructure, notes François Jarrige. François Gemenne is wary of distant targets, which lull action to sleep, when doing nothing costs far more than acting. Some are already changing course: in the Massif Central, threatened by the end of snow cover, small resorts are ready to give up skiing, observes Diego Landivar. Dreams of Mars will change nothing; for Gilles Bœuf, it is this planet we must take care of. Off camera, a question then comes from a father: what story should we tell a little boy of two and a half? François Jarrige replies that we must first undo the false promises, those made so that nothing changes, even at the risk of passing for a killjoy, and then relearn the concrete world: understanding a landscape, going for walks, using your legs, getting into the mud. At 22, Camille Étienne knows that 2050 will be her life. She admits to her sleepless nights and draws momentum from them: hope, she says, comes from action.
After coal and oil, today we want to add hydrogen and other new fuels, without the old energies ceasing to be used.
In the 18th century, the norm for thermal comfort was 12 to 13 degrees; our 22 or 23 degrees only date back to the 1970s.
In big cities, we could have “the same quality of mobility with 80% fewer vehicles”.
The smartphone has become “a new fundamental right of humanity”: depriving someone of it would be like depriving them of drinking water.“Power isn’t something you have or don’t have: it’s something you take, or leave to others.”Camille Étienne
“Director Christophe Cousin does not take the viewer for a fool. The quality of the contributors is undeniable. The interviews, well conducted and well structured, go beyond simple observation and offer in-depth analysis. The questions around progress, technology, the habitability of space and collective responsibility open up fascinating avenues. ‘The ecological transition shows that the world does not revolve around oneself, but around us.’ A necessary and salutary Copernican revolution.”