From Georges Pompidou to Thomas Pesquet, a leap in time and space.
Why?
During an official speech in Chicago on 28 February 1970, Georges Pompidou gave a visionary warning about environmental issues, and spoke of the Earth as seen from the moon, just as Thomas Pesquet could have done, who also moved us with his photos, being the eyes of the world for 6 months.
Full speech issu of the Institut Georges Pompidou. Acknowledgements.
This speech, given at the Alliance Française dinner during Georges Pompidou's trip to the United States, focuses on the environment.
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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 over 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 accumulating and spreading more and more, 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 was still striving to master at the beginning of this century, but as a precious and fragile environment that must be protected if the earth is to remain habitable for mankind.
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 crowded conditions of large conurbations, 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 and collective resources available to them. It is paradoxical to note that the development of the car, for example, which everyone expects to give them freedom of movement, ultimately results in traffic paralysis. The time is not far off when walking will emerge as the safest and fastest mode of transport in our big cities, if there are any pavements left! Similar problems are already beginning to arise in the air.
Even more serious than these traffic problems - although they are a cause of considerable physical and nervous fatigue for people, especially workers - are the moral consequences of living in modern cities. I am thinking, for example, of the increase in crime, particularly juvenile delinquency. Is the 'city', the symbol and centre of all human civilisation, in the process of destroying itself and breeding a new barbarism? A strange question, but one that we can't help asking, one that you are asking with a concern that we well understand, we Europeans whose history has consisted in pushing back the ancient Hercyan forest in favour of the city and who, today, have to worry about 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 head on. To achieve this, we need, as always, to take stock of the difficulties and look for the right solutions in each case. However, in the face of what is, we hope, only a phenomenon of growth, we are seeing 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 so well known to sociologists. This is an area for study and reform for the leaders of states and 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 scientific trial are appearing. Rather than fundamental science, the development of which nothing can halt or control, it is the technology that stems from it that can be used to better adapt applications to man and his need for happiness. We need to create and spread a kind of "environmental ethic" that requires the State, communities and individuals to respect a few basic 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 lay down the rules and to pronounce 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 midst of immensity, but which we know to be endowed with the fragile and perhaps unique privilege of life.
What better vision than this one (planet Earth seen from the Moon), strange and yet familiar, could make us aware of the precariousness of our terrestrial universe and the duties of solidarity involved in safeguarding it? the house of men.
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Dear Thomas: I repeat the invitation (already extended for late June 2016 but you must have been recovering!), you're welcome to Biomim'expo 2018 to discuss all this! http://www.biomimexpo.com
That was Pompidou's speech 47 years ago!
What a waste of time!
And it has to be said that Georges Pompidou was not the only one to have been moved by these issues and to have called for urgent attention to be paid to them, as the montage of this provocative Greenpeace clip shows! (in 2008 ... time flies)