But we didn't believe it. We didn't listen. We have not acted, or have acted only marginally, and we have entered a serious, unimaginable and irreversible phase of our human presence on the planet.

Philosophers like Jean-Pierre Dupuy have urged us to believe before it's too late, before the devastation becomes visible, because without that, maintaining the natural world as it was would be impossible.

In September 2023, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, said that our addiction to fossil fuels had ‘opened the gates of hell’. Here we are. The catastrophe is now visible.

The cycle of destruction of nature, climate and people has begun. Four million deaths are already attributable to climate change. 2023 was the year in which all records were broken: global temperature, ocean temperature, loss of ice cover. While a 7^th planetary limit, ocean acidification, is in the process of being exceeded, and 2023 saw the collapse of terrestrial carbon sinks, researchers who have been sounding the alarm for several decades have just published a report on climate change entitled ‘Perilous times for planet Earth’. This is the latest assessment of the impact of climate and biological upheaval on the planet and on human beings.

There is more than one climate disaster every day. The researchers have drawn up a non-exhaustive list of the main disasters attributed by science to climate change between the end of 2023 and August 2024 alone. There have been so many since. And yet, we have noticed that the traditional media hardly report on extreme events any more, unless they take place in our own country. The media hardly mention the floods in Eastern Europe or the extratropical storms that engulfed the Sahara in Yemen or Morocco for the first time in over 50 years.

The water cycle has been altered all over the world. It has become more irregular and unpredictable, leading to increasing problems of water shortages and surpluses. These alternating droughts and floods are increasing the proportion of uninhabitable areas. Sea levels are rising faster than predicted, gradually submerging much of the world's coastline and threatening to displace hundreds of millions of people before the end of the century. Living species are becoming extinct. In just 50 years (1970-2020), the average population size of wild species has declined catastrophically by 73%. In the North Sea, large fish have declined by more than 99% in just over a century.

The world as we know it is disappearing. Never before has humanity been faced with a shock of such magnitude. No past experience can point the way forward. Climate change and the destruction of the biosphere are bearing down on us, but we continue to look the other way and press the accelerator of disaster. 

Mourning and courage

How can we not despair of the logic at work? How can we not give up in the face of humanity's destructive power? By accepting that we must mourn.

Our mission is changing. Originally, nearly 20 years ago, we were fighting to preserve the living world as it existed. What kept us going was the idea that we could prevent losses, that we could protect species and habitats from disappearing. The acceleration of climate change and the methodical destruction of our environment are forcing us to mourn the loss of the world as we knew it. We have to recognise that we have not succeeded in getting the better of a financialised capitalist system that profits from the destruction of nature and the enslavement of human beings, but that we could not prevent the staggering devastation that we share and that irresponsible political leaders do not have the courage to anticipate.

It has been painful, and continues to be, and is accompanied by profound sadness. But it is our common destiny. We are forced to accept it. Since we will not be able to avoid all the losses, we must now act to avoid some of them and to avoid the worst. A world of +3.5°C global warming will be nothing like a world of +2°C.

Each piece of land or sea protected from destructive activities will provide an essential carbon sink to limit climate damage and also a refuge for biodiversity to regenerate and resist the collapse of living beings.

The unprecedented urgency facing us as a species demands that we redouble our courage and determination not to abandon humans and non-humans to the self-destructive steamroller of the dominant financial logic.

The situation may arouse immense anger in some people, but let's not forget that hope is seven times more likely to generate action against climate change than anger.

And to prepare for the future.

Young people are all the more angry that their future is doomed by collective inaction. Children born in 2020 will have to cope with up to seven times more extreme events, particularly heatwaves, than those born in 1960. This is intergenerational injustice. And it is for these young people that we must increase our energy and fighting spirit tenfold; it is on these young people and their creativity that we must pin our hopes to increase and renew our fight.

The only risk we face as a social body is not doing everything we can to limit the losses and unblock the future. Our role is to dare to project a different organisation of society, to propose roadmaps that break with the doomed and condemning ‘business as usual’ scenario.

We dare to say loud and clear that there is no place in the future for industrial fishing. We dare to say loud and clear that climate-changing fisheries such as trawling, which wrecks the seabed, species and public finances through the subsidies it receives, must and will disappear. We reaffirm that this disappearance must be programmed and supported so that fishermen alone do not bear the brunt of the choices made by a society that has bet on ecocidal extractive activities boosted by fossil fuels.

We believe in the regeneration of ecosystems and the extraordinary resilience of nature. We are banking on the greatest of human creativities: social innovation.

We know that we have entered a tunnel and that the horizon is dark, but we also know that we and our young people have no intention of ‘sleepwalking into extinction’. The fight has only just begun, and we need to step up our efforts, strengthen our ties, make our voices heard and help young people keep up the fight.

We must support activists to prevent the destruction of the world's main climate regulator: the ocean.

See, Claire Nouvian : « Ça y est, la bascule est en cours »