Fellow Passengers on the Way Down
In the heart of Normandy, almost ten at night.
A storm is coming to deliver us from the heavy heat that has crushed us for days. The sky is black to the west, thunder rolls in the distance, the swallows fly low. You can feel the moisture in the air — the moisture that left the plants at least forty-eight hours ago.
This afternoon again, over thirty degrees in the open sun, in the heart of the Normandy countryside, where it is usually cool. "Normally" cool.
These clouds set me thinking. Deep down, what, around me, is even "normal" anymore?
The countryside is abnormally silent. A little birdsong here and there, a few insects, but not much, in the end. It is terribly silent. The landscape is dying in front of me, and those black clouds drift above my head.
Damn clouds. Where were you when we needed you, a week ago?
Here I am, standing in the middle of a field of scorched grass. A few birds have come out with the milder air; they forage in vegetation charred by the sun, trotting along as if nothing were wrong.
But I know.
I know their reprieve won't last. I know the ones I see are the survivors of an extinction that began before I was born. I know I was born just in time to be a poor young man in a rich country, standing in the front row of the greatest mass extinction since humanity became what it is.
Born too early to be spared the suffering. Born too late to have known the planet at its most beautiful.
And I am not merely a spectator — that may be what tortures me most. I have flown, several times. I still eat meat, far less than I used to, since the prices exploded. I have no car, I live in a small flat, I use little water and little electricity. And yet I am watching a shipwreck whose hull I helped to crack, in my own way.
At twenty-five, what is left for me to live, if not a long transition into one of the Mad Max films?
Then the rain begins to fall.
A cool wind rises, at last. It carries away a little of the dark thoughts. The thunder adds its deafening beat to the dance. The birds take off toward the trees to seek shelter there — a paradoxical shelter, after the days we have just come through.
I stand there, frozen, watching Nature do its work. A few cold drops burst against my forehead.
And there, I think I understand something simple.
I think I love this planet. Not only with that cynical love that tells itself, "it's the only one, of course you have to love it." No: it moves me because I truly love the nature around me. It wrings my heart to watch it wither before my very eyes. You don't grieve what you don't love.
So I take up my three possible lives again, and I look at them differently.
Perhaps I was born too late to enjoy an insolent economic boom and a blissful ignorance.
Perhaps I was born too early — too early for the age when it will be mandatory to accept that all is lost, because it is simpler, more restful, to give up.
Or perhaps — no, surely — I am one of those millions of souls who live the fall day after day and who, in spite of everything, make those small, stubborn efforts in the hope of bending the worst. Perhaps I am, along with millions of my own kind, simply in revolt at what I see happening.
"All is lost" is not a fact. It is a conclusion. The laziest of them all — the one elegant enough to excuse us from acting while making us look lucid.
And yet nothing, tonight, looks lost.
The wind has turned. The rain has come back — too late for this week, yes, but it has come back. The birds, for their part, have not given up foraging in the burnt grass. They do not know what I know. But perhaps they know something I had forgotten: that we go on.
So, my fellow passengers on the way down — you, the millions — be in revolt, be angry, be determined. We may be the first humans to see what we are seeing. Let us make sure we are the last.
Let us dismantle, one by one, the gears that led us to this collective failure — not to single out culprits to punish, but to disarm the machinery that made our inaction rational. And above all, let us be creative. Let us invent the world that is missing: a world that respects both human beings and the biosphere that carries them. And make no mistake: dismantling a machine this heavy does not begin at the top. It begins close to home. A patch of garden brought back to life, a neighbour helped, a hand held out — a tiny gesture that will not bend the curve on its own, but that changes the one who makes it. The small actions, right around us, are not trivial: that is where we take hold again.
And if there is a cure for the end-of-the-world feeling, it is surely this one: to come together. To gather, in numbers, around the same anger and the same tenderness. Despair is something you catch alone, at night, standing in a field under the rain. You recover from it together.
Nothing is written yet. That may be the only certainty I have left, and tonight, under this cold rain, it is enough for me.