Since man has been man, growth, expansion, conquest, has been at the expense of the other, physically. The survival of the one has meant the death of the other, the domination of the one by the submission of the other.

In times of war, to "collaborate" is to submit, to betray. In times of peace, military confrontation has become political (Cold War), then economic (globalisation). But the spirit remains the same: to be strong is to dominate, no longer to conquer territories but market shares.

And if it is not always ordering, it is influencing, a new social form of superiority, of "popularity". Sharing, collaborating, exchanging, showing solidarity, are certainly all recognised 'values', but they are often considered as acts of deprivation, renunciation, disinterest, leaving only the sacrosanct spirit of competition and power to increase one's well-being.

From then on, collaboration and solidarity seem to us to be unnatural, like 'extra-human' values that are more spiritual than human or animal in nature. Besides, aren't we taught from our earliest childhood the 'law of the jungle' and the food chain as a succession of predations? It would therefore be quite "natural" for man to be a predator for man.

But now we are reaching the limits of the finite world, not the natural world of the biosphere, which has every chance of outliving us, but our own little parallel world, artificial, detached, as if we could live in weightlessness. We are reaching two limits: an economic limit and an ecological limit, and this reduction in inertia simply brings us back down to earth.

We are caught up in our own gravity. Growth, long considered a source of progress, including social progress, is proving to be the mother of all our vices and an ecological morphine. The engine of opulence and carelessness stops and we fall back. This growth is no longer there, because, like the trees, it does not reach the sky. Therefore, another model must be invented, and it is not a question of technological innovations for which we seem to have unlimited capacity, but of a new model of organisation of the human community, based more on collaboration than on competition, in other words, a cultural revolution.

It is here that the second, ecological, limit can help us, paradoxically. Indeed, environmental awareness (even if regularly denied) makes us (re)aware of our 'humanity' in the sense of a human community with a common destiny. I lack what you waste, I die from what you pollute. We are condemned to be interdependent and interconnected, and not only on social networks!

Globalisation is not only economic, it is also geological and cultural, and the only borders that remain, even if they too are crumbling, are those of political states. Our world is becoming increasingly porous, and in a way that's good, long live capillarity!

What would be strong, symbolic and amusing ... would be if Unesco classified ... our planet ... as a World Heritage Site! Because in the end, it is the only one that has the keys to save us. To be inspired by it is to protect it, and ourselves. I launch here the idea and this strange call ... like a bottle in the biosphere 🙂