Lhe ruling generation of the “glorious thirty”, polarized on growth and its equitable sharing, has its share of responsibility in climate change. The generation currently in economic and political affairs has the difficult task of imagining and implementing a transition of the model. It must do this in close liaison with the next generation, born after 2000, who live in terrible stress. Yes, the question of the future of the planet must be intergenerational. It is not at all enough. We confuse the urgency of becoming aware of a change of course with the duration that the implementation of a new economic and even more so cultural, even civilizational model will require.
A retrospective look at the post-war period: the program of the National Council of Resistance, Social Security, European construction, etc. show that building an economic and social model takes several decades. With resistances, conquests, backtracking. We will not get out of the climate change caused by human activity in five or ten years!
Let’s go back to a longer time to deconstruct our model and reconstruct a new one over several generations. Our son-father postulate thus leads us to support together two methods from the XXe century by renewing them deeply so that they respond to the challenges of the 21ste : planning and popular education. These are examples.
“Go to Root”
A reinvented, co-constructed, territorialized democratic planning, to articulate systemic transformation objectives and important means over time. Not on energy alone, nor only by 2030. A planning of ambitious and funded contracts, signed with sectors and with territories, constituting real alliances of actors for the transition. Cooperation must replace competition alone.
A popular education to animate collectively, “all knowers, all learners”, a cultural change in references and behaviors. Change food, mobility, way of living and taking care of yourself? No magic wand to achieve this. Purely technological or technocratic change, the natural inclination of the elites, without popular support, fails. The same goes for a state ecology or an environmentalist approach that ignores the social. Embarking civil society, youth towards a distant renewal implies a narrative of positive hopes that is lacking. It must be intergenerational work! In the maquis, those resisting barbarism had baptized their program “Happy Days”: will we dare, together, to project our initiatives towards “happy decades”?
You have 57.5% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.