“The colonization of our imagination
has been neoliberalism’s greatest success.”
Naomi Klein
At the base of these new stories, there is the questioning of one of the foundations of our vision of the world. So anchored that we almost forget to question it: that of the difference between culture and nature. Well after the separation made by Descartes (and how to question it when Descartes gave his name to the adjective Cartesian, which has become synonymous with logic?), it is first the anthropologist Philippe Descola who tries to change the paradigm in his work Beyond Nature and Culture from 2005.
He introduces in particular the notions of “human living” and “non-human”, in an attempt to decenter the humanist conception that places humans at the center of the universe, and therefore considers them to be a priority over the rest of their environment. Today, it is the philosopher Baptiste Morizot who devotes his work, to borrow the title of one of his books, to other Ways of Being Alive (2020). For the researcher (and tracker), “the specificity of naturalism is to have invented the first cosmology that postulates that we are not required to show consideration towards the world that made us. Towards the living world with which we share the Earth. Towards the ecosystems that feed us, the same ones that generate the water we drink and the oxygen we breathe”*. As another imaginary, Morizot advocates a new form of diplomacy with the rest of the living in order to exercise our capacity to coexist with the biodiversity that founds us. A redrawing of the territory also advocated by the philosopher Vinciane Despret (Habiter en oiseau) and, among others, all the authors of the Mondes Sauvages collection of Actes sud.
*Afterword to Sébastien Bohler’s book, Where is the meaning?, Robert Laffont, 2020
To create new narratives, we need new stories, new points of view, but also new words. This is the conclusion reached by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in his book Earth’s Emotions: New Words for a New World. For him, the world is experiencing such upheaval that our vocabulary is no longer relevant to describe it. In order to grasp reality as it is, it is therefore necessary to invent a new lexicon.
Which he does himself since it is to him that we owe solastalgia, that is, the existential and lived experience of a negative environmental change, felt as an aggression against our sense of belonging to a place. He also defines himself as a farmosopher, who combines reflection and writing with the cultivation of food products and the protection of a refuge for fauna and flora.
In his wake, we also find the astrophysicist and philosopher Aurélien Barreau, also convinced that to change the world, we must first tackle its logos (Il faut une révolution politique, poétique et philosophique, Zulma, 2022).
There are those who have always known, those who have never wanted to see anything, and then those who have agreed to change along the way. The stories of those who have experienced redemption are also a message of hope against all the OK Boomers who continue to argue on TV sets to conclude that we can no longer say anything and that the world, frankly, was better before. More or less late reversals that do not escape any sector, whether we think of Paul Watson (founder of the NGO Sea Shepherd then Sea Shepherd Origins), former trainer of Flipper the dolphin who became a hunter of whalers, or Richard Curtis, director of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Notting Hill and Love Actually, who recently said he regrets his fat-phobic jokes and the lack of diversity in his films: “I was stupid and I was wrong about it”, or the actress Muriel Robin who admits to having changed her mind on several subjects related to feminism and homophobia.
“On movie screens, inside companies or in the law, the creation of new imaginaries involves the writing of new myths.”
They will have obtained a symbolic euro but above all for the first time the recognition by the courts that the State committed a “fault” by showing itself incapable of keeping its commitments to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) over the period 2015-2018. They are the four NGOs (Notre affaire à tous, Greenpeace, Oxfamand Fondation Nicolas Hulot) who had filed an appeal in 2019 before the Paris administrative court for “culpable failure” of the State. At the origin of this “Case of the century”, widely relayed by the media and supported by a wide range of celebrities and influencers, there is the idea that new narratives are also written in the law.
It is this same desire to create new imaginaries that has pushed certain countries to give part of their ecosystems not new variations of their mythologies but rather a legal personality. In other words, to recognize rights specific to natural entities, as is the case for rivers, which must have the right to exist and regenerate their natural cycles (a right that has been acquired by, among others, the Atrato River in Colombia, the Whanganui River in New Zealand, all rivers in Bangladesh and the Magpie River in Canada).
In France, the idea is slower to take hold, but groups are trying to advance this cause. In 2019, the Loire Parliament was launched. In 2021, the declarations of rights for Tavignano (Corsica) and Têt (Pyrénées-Orientales) were proclaimed. And in 2023, the manifestos for the Durance and the Arc, as well as the MerMéd project in Marseille, which aims to give rights to the Mediterranean Sea.
They are trying to reinvent the narratives where the myths of growth and technological solutions are strongest: within the company. First, by proposing more virtuous models within their companies but also by campaigning for more demanding laws regarding their own activity.
This is the case, for example, of Julia Faure, who co-founded the clothing brand Loom, a counter-model to fast fashion with sustainable and locally made clothing, or of the collective En Mode Climat, which advocates laws in favor of the environment and the common good in the field of fashion.
She also became the co-president of Impact France with Pascal Demurger, the CEO of Maif. Representing this movement of entrepreneurs and managers who put ecological and social impact at the heart of their corporate mission, she recently defended the conditionality of aid to companies, based on their ecological and social impact vs. the “vice premium”, that is to say the competitive advantage of doing badly.
Creating a new imaginary is not always a matter of words.
Sometimes it involves the body. Some activists do not hesitate to put theirs in danger to get their message across and alert people to the urgency or absurdity of a situation. Like the Tibetan Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire to protest the Chinese occupation, these activists put their bodies in the balance to tell another side of the story. We are of course thinking of Thomas Brail, who went on hunger strike, then thirst strike, before being molested by the police, in an attempt to suspend the construction of the A69 motorway between Toulouse and Castres, the route of which threatens to cut down hundreds of trees. Or the farmer Cédric Herrou, who has been arrested and held in custody for helping refugees cross the French-Italian border.
Whether they are autonomous, have been through the ZADs, are fans of the writer Alain Damasio or the philosopher Yves Citton, these activists have chosen to occupy the terrain of the margins to try to reinvent a world that lives up to their demands (and their imagination).
They are often very much at the forefront of creating new images and positive stories about civil disobedience. “Unionized wild boars” who attack golf courses, anti-SUV “tire deflators”, “hot tub puncturers” or soup throwers not on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers but on the shop window that houses them…
These actions attempt to shift our thinking on what we give value to, financial and symbolic. Finally, it is a whole imaginary of occupation that they come to revive and reinvent. Among the ways of telling a story, they choose the “army of shadows” option, indeterminate, leaderless but numerous (“Friend, if you fall, a friend comes out of the shadows in your place,” the Song of the Partisans tells us). And they want to occupy the field for a long time. This is, for example, the whole imagination deployed by the Earth Uprisings against the megabasin projects or the A69 motorway.
They are capable of linking together trips, debates, conferences, media interventions (but also death threats, hateful comments, tough dialogues) to tirelessly warn about the dangers faced by the planet and popularize current climate issues at all costs.
Among these climate spokespeople in France, we find of course Camille Etienne, engaged in various struggles, notably against Total, and author of Pour un révolutionne écologique : aller notre impoutence collective. But also the director and writer Cyril Dion, co-founder of the Colibris movement, revealed by the film Demain in 2015. Oscillating between a factual description of the situation that does not evade the urgency and the scale of the issues, and the outline of a future that is still possible, these activists advocate a form of reconciliation between the population and a vision of progress that is less consumerist and materialistic. In order to get around what they consider to be the major obstacle in the battle of imaginations: knowledge is not enough to trigger new behaviors. The same observation is also the starting point for the commitment of the most widely publicized whistleblower at the international level, the Swedish Greta Thunberg and her famous “How dare you?” speech at the United Nations in 2009, in which she listed all the alarm signals that were not enough to trigger decision-making.
Creating new imaginaries requires more than just
good intentions. To do this, several structures provide technical assistance for the emergence of new stories in the company of scriptwriters, directors, broadcasters or producers, by producing meetings, events and masterclasses.
This is the case of the Fabrique des nouveaux récits. But also of Imagine 2050, an impact production and committed consulting company that offers awareness and mobilization content on the issues of ecological and social transition. Or the Atmosphère Festival, which raises awareness among creatives about what a society compatible with living things could be. For example, actress, author and director Valérie Zoydo signed the Parcours Nouveaux Récits and produced the report for ADEME
“What storytelling of current issues in the film and television industry?”.
If imagination is not enough, why not show them directly?
For some activists, the solution lies in the active realization of alternative scenarios. Among them, Rob Hopkins, the initiator of the Transition Towns Movement (a movement born in 2006 in England) who relied on existing communities to imagine other ways of living and thinking about the city, by generalizing initiatives such as AMAP networks (associations for the maintenance of peasant agriculture), local and complementary currencies, SEL (local exchange systems) or resource centers (places where unused objects or waste are collected to be reused or recycled) but also anything that allows agriculture to be reintegrated into the urban fabric (shared gardens, composters, edible plantations in public spaces, green roofs in the city dedicated to agriculture). Closer to home, Frédéric Bosqué, founder of the Tera project in Lot-et-Garonne, aims to revitalize a rural area by relocating 90% of vital production to the inhabitants. He is experimenting with an unconditional autonomy income, i.e. a basic income above the poverty threshold paid with this local currency, guaranteed by the production resulting from these new activities and cumulative with other income.
Among the builders of new worlds, we finally find those who build for others. These are all those who work for example for the Wildlife Reserves® of the Association for the Protection of Wild Animals and Natural Heritage (ASPAS).
Download your copy
