“Socio-ecological co-viability”: inhabiting the Earth differently

Book. Thinking against our era, still dominated by greed, is what the book La Coviabilité socio-écologique (Frémeaux et associés, 240 pages, 22 euros) invites us to do. The book is of a reasonable size but addresses a dizzying notion, as "coviability" remains foreign to Donald Trump's desire to exploit "the liquid gold beneath our feet," in the words of the American president during his inaugural address on January 20.

It also invites a large majority of Westerners to turn the page on centuries of human use of nature. "Faced with the ecological emergency, the objective of viability constitutes an imperative to give ourselves a future. Given the absence of planet B, the existence of humans on planet Earth is only made possible by coexistence with the non-human," summarize the authors in the introduction, for whom "predation" , "destruction" , "extractiveism" and "productivism" threaten the living environment of all societies.

Coordinated by Olivier Barrière, a lawyer and anthropologist, the work brings together the contributions of 63 specialists from four continents, including ecologists, designers, computer scientists, engineers, etc. A certain vision of "nature" is thus challenged, a "Western construct that establishes the separation of humans from the rest of the living." Thus, the "sustainable development" objectives resulting from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1992 are still too "separatist," according to them.

"Like all international texts that followed, this one focuses essentially on the environment of human beings ," we can read. The authors advocate, on the contrary, a more global vision since "human societies grow, not in parallel, but at the crossroads of life." Regulation, cooperation, interspecific collective... The three chapters cover many avenues present in the different schools of ecological thought. The objective? To find a happy outcome for human societies as well as for bees.

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