From Georges Pompidou to Thomas Pesquet, a jump in time and space.

Why?

Because during an official speech on 28 February 1970 in Chicago, Georges Pompidou alerted us to environmental issues through visionary words, and spoke of the earth seen from the moon as Thomas Pesquet could have done, who also moved us through his photos, by being the eyes of the world for 6 months.

Full speech issu of the Georges Pompidou Institute. Acknowledgements.

This speech, given at the Alliance Française dinner during Georges Pompidou's trip to the United States, has the environment as its main theme.

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With a population of eight million, a gross annual product of $46 billion, an annual family income of $14,000, and a steel production greater than that of France, Chicago needs no praise. The reality of its businesses speaks for itself, as does the beauty of its skyscrapers which evoke the names of the greatest architects, such as Mies van der Rohe. In the adventure of modern America, of the modern world, your city plays an eminent role that is conferred on it by the entrepreneurial spirit and the energy of its citizens. No city is more representative of the extraordinary technical and industrial progress made by the United States.

But the pace of this evolution is creating unexpected problems for man at the end of the 20th century. Taken by surprise by the transformations of his environment for which he is directly responsible, he wonders if he is still capable of mastering the scientific and technological discoveries that he expected to bring him happiness. Like a sorcerer's apprentice, does he not risk perishing in the end because of the forces he has unleashed?

Man's hold on nature has become such that it carries the risk of destroying nature itself. It is striking to note that at a time when so-called consumer goods are increasingly accumulating and spreading, it is the most basic goods necessary for life, such as air and water, that are beginning to be lacking. Nature appears to us less and less as the formidable power that man at the beginning of this century was still striving to master, but as a precious and fragile framework that must be protected if the earth is to remain habitable for man.

This is largely the consequence of urban development that has reached alarming proportions and is of concern to all those responsible. In Chicago, you are particularly concerned about this.

In the crowdedness of large urban areas, people are burdened with all kinds of constraints and constraints that go far beyond the advantages of a higher standard of living and the individual or collective means at their disposal. It is paradoxical to note that the development of the automobile, for example, which everyone expects to enjoy freedom of movement, ultimately results in traffic paralysis. The time is not far off when walking will appear to be the safest and fastest mode of transport in our large cities, if there are any pavements left! Similar problems are already beginning to arise in the air.

More serious than these traffic problems - even though they are a cause of considerable physical and nervous fatigue for people, especially for workers - are the moral consequences of living in modern cities. I am thinking, for example, of the increase in crime, especially juvenile delinquency. Is the 'city', the symbol and centre of all human civilisation, destroying itself and producing a new barbarism? A strange question, but one that we cannot help asking, one that you are asking with a concern that we Europeans understand well, since our history has consisted of the retreat of the ancient Hercynian forest to the benefit of the city, and today we must be concerned with restoring the forest to its rightful place. These are some of the challenges to modern society, to use President Nixon's expression, that we are beginning to realise and that we need to face. In order to do this, it is necessary, as always, to identify the difficulties and to look for the appropriate solutions in each case. However, in the face of what is hopefully only a phenomenon of growth, we can see how slowly institutions are being developed compared to the lightning development of technology. The organisation of society is not adapting to the enormous demographic growth and displacement that is causing the "congestion" phenomena well known to sociologists. This is a subject for study and reform for the leaders of states and large cities alike.

But it is a fact that each problem solved gives rise to others, usually more difficult, and that man is led to question the belief in linear progress according to which each success of discovery would add to the previous ones in a continuous chain leading to happiness.

Thus, at the very moment when scientists are winning their most spectacular and mind-expanding victories, the first elements of a science trial are appearing. More than the fundamental science whose development nothing can stop, nor control its orientations, it is from the technology which proceeds from it that it is possible to direct the applications in order to better adapt them to man and his need for happiness. A sort of "environmental morality" must be created and spread, imposing on the State, on communities and on individuals, the respect of a few elementary rules, without which the world would become unbreathable.

It is no coincidence that the United States, a country at the forefront of economic expansion and technical progress, is also the country with the greatest interest in so-called "conservation" issues. The protection of the natural environment must now be one of our primary concerns.

It follows that the role of the public authorities can only expand, since it is for them to issue the rules and to pronounce the prohibitions. But the application of these rules cannot be left to the sole discretion of civil servants or technicians. In a field on which the daily life of people directly depends, the control of citizens and their effective participation in the planning of their existence is more necessary than elsewhere.

I would add that the solution will be best sought within an international framework and in the cooperation of all nations, particularly all industrial nations, equally concerned about the dangers that threaten them and anxious to avert them. You know that President Nixon has taken initiatives in this direction. Similarly, France and the United States, in their recent agreements to develop their scientific and technical cooperation, have rightly placed at the top of the list of problems which they feel require joint action, those of town planning, the fight against pollution, and transport planning. By developing cooperation which does not, of course, involve any exclusivity, our two countries will set an example which I hope will be followed.

On several occasions during this journey, I have already mentioned the extraordinary epic of your astronauts who set out to conquer the Moon. Among the images that television broadcast on that occasion, none struck me as much as that of the Earth, seen for the first time from interplanetary space. Shrouded in vapour, adorned in impressionistic colours, the Earth appeared to us as an island lost in the middle of immensity, but which we know to be endowed with the fragile and perhaps unique privilege of life.

What better vision than this one (the planet Earth seen from the Moon), strange and yet familiar, could make us aware of the precariousness of our terrestrial universe and of the duties of solidarity involved in safeguarding the house of men.

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Dear Thomas: I reiterate the invitation (already issued for the end of June 2016 but you must have been recovering!), you are welcome to Biomim'expo 2018 to exchange on all this! http://www.biomimexpo.com

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This speech by Pompidou was 47 years ago!

What a waste of time!

And it must be acknowledged that Georges Pompidou is not the only one to have been moved by these issues and to have called for the urgency of addressing them, as shown in this provocative Greenpeace clip! (in 2008 ... time passes)