Half a century apart, two definitions of development face each other: that of the French economist François Perroux and that of the Indian philosopher Amartya Sen. For Perroux, development is the “combination of mental and social changes in a population which make it capable of cumulatively and sustainably growing its real product” (Perroux, 1961). At the heart of the 20th century, all human forces were summoned by Perroux to increase GDP. For Sen (2001), development is on the contrary the “process of expansion of the substantial freedoms available to people”. At the dawn of the 21st century, all material resources are called upon by Sen to make humans freer. This book clearly leans towards Sen. The growth of nations, the attractiveness of cities, the profit of companies are in the 21st century designs that are not only useless, but also, the height of irony, counterproductive, since they undermine their own foundations. Alternatives to these broken compasses exist: well-being, resilience, sustainability. The means to achieve them are within our reach: the well-being transition can rely on the reform of budgetary procedures at all levels of government to quickly become a reality. But, at the time of closing this reflection, it seems necessary to return to the very notion of development which underlies this ambition. Development has long been a universal, economic or political goal to achieve; Today it is a common limit that must not be crossed. This development as a limit must become the reference for public and private policies. How ?
First of all, there is a space for human development to be reconquered within the framework of the biosphere by reducing inequalities. This is the space for social-ecological progress: the decline in inequalities makes societies more stable, but also more sustainable, and this ambition is partly linked to the exit from growth. Let’s take the example of climate change and the levers at our disposal to mitigate it. On August 1, 2018, the New York Times devoted an entire issue of its influential Sunday edition, and a large space online, to the story of a tragic failure: that of climate inaction. While the broad outlines of climate science had been established, the decade 1979-1989, this well-documented article tells us, would have resulted not in drawing the consequences, but in ignoring them. “Thirty years ago, we had a chance to save the planet,” was the headline in the magazine, which attracted considerable attention and immediate praise. The facts he reported were useful to anyone interested in the history of climate science and policy; However, the story he used is misleading in at least four ways, which will allow us to specify the means of the well-being transition.
Primarily, science alone is never sufficient to trigger action, particularly when the action in question must be global to be effective. As Jean-Pierre Dupuy rightly noted, we must not only know, we must believe what we know. The purely cerebral world in which enlightened scientists, increasingly convinced that they are right, manage to convince ignorant citizens of the seriousness of ecological crises in order to “save the planet” is a naive fiction. Good science can alert us to the facts, and this is certainly an essential first step, but it is not enough to build our determination or free our energies. If humans need to know, they then need to believe – that is to say, to give meaning to their knowledge – and also to dream in order to resolve to change (a well-known joke reminds us that everyone wants progress, but no one wants change). The science of climate change may have largely crystallized thirty years ago, but that by no means means that we had everything we needed to act then and that we blew it.
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Secondly, the “planet”, several billion years old, will save itself, and very probably a good part of life with it, that which we will not have had time to destroy before disappearing. On the other hand, if we don't change the course of things, we won't be there to see it. In other words, what is at stake is the planet’s hospitality to humans. Even more precisely, what we absolutely must preserve is the planet’s hospitality for the most vulnerable among us. It is the poorest who suffer the most from environmental degradation. The ecological crises that are worsening before our eyes promise and are already inflicting hell on earth. “Save the planet” or, even worse, “save the climate” are abstract and misleading slogans that blur the real issues that are before our eyes.
Thirdly, a number of decisive actions were taken immediately after this so-called "lost decade", beginning with the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. What followed, in just a few years, the publication of the first IPCC assessment report (1990), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), the first meeting of the Conference of the Parties under the auspices of the United Nations ( in 1995 in Berlin) and the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 – the very first global climate agreement. How can we think that all this amounts to “ignoring” climate science? If a decade was lost, it was lost ten years later, between Kyoto and the failure of the Copenhagen summit (2009). This proves that the transition beyond climate disaster to well-being is indeed possible.
Finally, and most importantly, the narrative that thirty years ago “we knew everything but did nothing” completely misses the kind of knowledge needed to avoid climate chaos. : it is not the science of climate change that we must learn to master, but the science of human change. Certainly, the gap between the progress of scientific knowledge and the inertia of political action has probably never been greater, although the Paris Agreement (2015) was negotiated, signed and ratified in record time . One explanation for this apparent "knowledge action paradox" lies in the nature of the scientific knowledge produced: while climate science has made giant strides in recent decades, progress in what we might call "science of the transition” are much more measured. We know far more about the causes of the climate crisis than we do about practical ways to solve it.
Two particularly promising avenues that this book defends consist of articulating the question of sustainability with that of justice and abandoning economic growth as the horizon of our societies. This is the meaning of the new ecological situation which could emerge in Europe and in France and of which the green growth to which we want to reduce it is the negation. Let's be even more precise. The two greatest forces accelerating climate change year after year, particularly over the past forty years, are the increase in the world population and the increase in material wealth per capita. This is true retrospectively and prospectively (see table 10). However, mastering these dynamics has everything to do with the reduction of social inequalities and the exit from growth such as this book has attempted to give them meaning and substance.
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