The “day of surpassing” recalls the imperative nature of decrease

The day of July 24 marks the “day of surpassing”, according to the International Global Footprint Network collective. Nevertheless, That is to say that because of our production methods dominated by the extractivist. In addition, productivist, consumerist and capitalist ideology, we have exhausted what the planet is able to generate without being mortgaged.

This data concerns different issues: forest areas, arable land and pasture, carbon footprint, urban sprawl and the intensity of peaches. Similarly, It goes hand in hand with the theory of planetary limits established by the Stockholm Resilience Center. Therefore, It concerns nine essential areas for planetary balance: climate upheavals. In addition, massive extinction of species, loss of nitrogen and phosphorus in soils, reduction of arable land, ocean acidification, freshwater exhaustion, impoverishment of the ozone layer, the rate of chemical pollutants and the increase in aerosols in the atmosphere. “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature For example, Eight of these areas are the subject of commensurable approaches and six have entered critical condition. However, The conditions are no longer met so that they continue to exist in a stable. Therefore, sustainable way: it is said then that the deterioration thresholds have already been crossed.

From now on. Furthermore, according to these synthetic works, all that we will take from territories, waters, flora and fauna, and all that we will produce as waste will undermine in its essence and its source the ability of these goods to regenerate. However, It’s not nothing. Nevertheless, It is even major. Meanwhile, Worse, it’s incredible. However, Never has we had seen our reference habitat for thousands of years being so deeply disturbed. Therefore, it was once melted in the manner of a stable and universal guarantor. Therefore, This is the end of the famous Latin phrase Ceteris Paribus Sic Stantibus: “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature now nothing is equal more. Additionally, Therefore, Everything moves. Nevertheless, Everything is deteriorating.

The trend is so heavy that the Global Footprint Network had to be ahead of the date. However, so much the situation is so worsened. Meanwhile, The threshold was set at the start on August 13, then at the 9th of the same month.

The collective of scientists supported by environmental organizations ventilated its data and establishes dates according to the countries. Therefore, If all the countries on the planet behaved in the same way in France. Consequently, in Canada for example, in proportion to their importance, the “day of surpassing” would already have occurred, respectively on April 19 and March 26 of this year. Similarly, This means that in the first moments of spring. However, these two countries have already exhausted their due and live ecologically on credit, beyond these dates.

What to do? For example, “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature Do otherwise. Similarly, The essential logic does not only imply to simply stagge over twelve months all that has been consumed in. However, a fortnight. Consequently, Mathematics here are of no relevance. For example, First of all. Nevertheless, it is a question of putting into practice sharing methods relating to profound changes in manners with regard to the private property of motor instruments, vehicles and infrastructure. These data involve. in a second step, to review eating practices (magnitude of the diet based on meat or animal derivatives) and the production methods in architecture.

In any case, the question of decrease now weighs on consciences to the point of putting pressure on them. As the sociologist Yves-Marie Abraham. specialist in this field writes, writes, “the question is whether this decrease will be suffered, a brutal and uncontrollable consequence of the overtaking of the biophysical limits of the planet, or if it “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature will be chosen and assumed collectively, in order to avoid humans, in particular to the most deprived of them, the disastrous effects of such an overtaking” (NCS, Automn 2015). He reiterated it in healing infinite evil: “If we really want to stop aggravating the ecological disaster. to avoid, among other things, to have to undergo in the short or medium term a form of suffering and wild decrease, a consequence of overcoming planetary biophysical limits, the only solution is to produce less than it is done today.” (Ecosociété. 2019)

The time has come to take seriously the need for this “if”, to stop making it an obvious reject. Empressed. we tend to break with the productivist unleashing to adopt now practices aimed at entering symbiosis with the living and composing with a territory without mistreating it. The decrease, in this limited sense, concerns a project knowingly wanted.

Remains the other “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature term. The decrease, to one degree or another, will prove, yes, “suffered” and sometimes sudden for other categories of people. Either they will bend to its imperative character given the evolution of market indicators. or they will only give in on the day of the wilderness announced.

By following the gradient. we see that, on one point or another, it is the objective constraint which brings the subjects to reason. The energy question arises particularly emblematic. When the price of petrol to the pump increases, we discover the virtues of carpooling and aspires to public transport. When the price of cars increases, the public maintains more those available to it. At this stage, the relatively decreasing bias can come from environments from which it was not expected. Even a reptilian capitalist like Pierre Fitzgibbon. a time minister in Quebec of the economy, innovation and energy, recommended the limitation of the “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature production of cars, in view of the climate issue (“it is necessary to reduce the car fleet, reiterates Fitzgibbon”, Le Devoir, August 16, 2023). We could add the question of minerals, limited in quantities and polluting to extract. For its part. the World Economic Forum, famous for the annual meeting it organizes in Davos, advocates a reduction in the number of cars at 75%. In this spirit, the French Republic, for example, prohibited advertising aimed at stimulating energy consumption.

But it’s too little, too late. We discover it by now experiencing the backlash of decades of negligence. which manifest themselves in the day of rain, ice, droughts and erosion. Each year, in the western North American, thousands of refugees must leave their house in disaster. A direct consequence. the Outaouais valley has become the most polluted region in the world last June 6, the consequences of forest fires which occurred “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature more than 700 km from home. A few days earlier in Switzerland, the Birch glacier collapsed in the village of Blatten and destroyed it. Abnormal floods carried out vehicles in the waves in South Africa these days …

Why do we come from this now excess day, without having been able to repel it at least on December 31? Because, precisely, not to desire the decrease, we have managed to have it to teach it to the harsh. Decrease, then, it is necessary in its flesh. As we hit a wall, the term loses all ambiguity. It is no longer the anti -capitalist invocation seeking to resist the order led by the greedy thirst for profits. dividends. It is no longer the fantasized beheading of a capitalization regime that legitimizes only actions contributing to its increase. It is no longer a change of expected manners we do not know how. “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature bringing the multitude to turn their backs on the manipulative offer of consumption neurologists, marketing psychologists, semiologists of the advertisement, these traitors! Hay of these subtleties of language!

No crowd movement wishes or planning decrease. For those who are afraid of it. she has the echo of the gargling; The skin is gray, the lower lip is trembling and the gaze becomes torive. We regress the status of undead. They then fear the proliferation of I had you had it. Because we feared it. decrease will be imposed by the strength of things, in its flesh, and will therefore manifest itself exactly as it is apprehensive, painful, empowering, physical, wherever it passes for desirable …

Alas, all these events still do not constitute sufficient “evidence” to arouse the immediate awakening of the greatest number. He will have to hit a wall for decreasing the object of considerations. In its ideological “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature candor, the Quebec public agitator Richard Martineau had viturated it during the period marked by COVVID. While the shops. restaurants had to close and some of them were anxious about their fate, he savoring while biting well in all his words: “Do you find it cool, decrease?” Is it fun, huh? More. less people who consume, more and more people who lose their job, the stock market that panics, people who lose their savings … Do you find that triper decay? ” (Words reproduced in “Le Éogisier 2020” by Olivier Niquet on Radio-Canada, January 1, 2021.)

For people that we have led to identify with the consumer delirium of infinite growth in a finished world. necessity will be law. It is still, in terms of social, cultural and practical behavior, of a vast majority. The atavism of consumption is simply too large. A marketing industry has known. since its invention, “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature then said “propaganda”, by Edward Bernays, nephew of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, colonizing desire, encoding by market production the signs and symbols by which it manifests itself to conscience. At the end of the last century. Doris-Louise Haineault studied how advertising symbolism contaminates the seat of desire and, more recently, Michel Desmurget, specialist in neuroscience, explored the ravages produced by “social media” on brain activity in the Digital Cretin factory (Seuil, 2019)

Sooner or later, now for warned people and later for those it traumatizes, decrease will mark the imperative from which it is necessary to think quite differently the definition of the relationship to the territory. Because we no longer suit the fact that the food that we eat. the slightest object that we buy has traveled on average several thousand kilometers, it will be to reorganize production within a regional radius of life. This will be made in “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature connection with the territory that we live in. the community on which we depend on the last instance.

The disasters. tragedies that decades of irresponsible assets will too often lead to a feeling of abandonment among the different communities, such as in Clova, Valence or Mayotte, in recent years experienced by forest fires, Diluvian rains or cyclones. We discover ourselves at that time in a dereliction situation. we understand the hard way the discourse, the practices and commitments of those who have already made the side of decrease. “Bioregion”. concept founded exactly fifty years ago by Allen Van Newkirk, in Nova Scotia on the edge of the Atlantic, then becomes the name of this symbiotic whole where we undertake to live in close relation to the territory which we learn, by force of things, to respect the modalities of existence
And a community that is no longer virtual.

Alain “day surpassing” recalls imperative nature Deneault is a professor of philosophy at the University of Moncton in Shippagan and author of Do that! Political commitment to the era of incredibleLux, 2024.