Glossary
"The "Grow and multiply" that irresistibly animates humans
The perpetuation of the human species has so far been manifested through our reproductive instincts. It now passes through the mastery of this instinct.
The very biblical “cross and multiply” is no longer on the agenda, given the demographic danger. Unfortunately, it is still present in our culture, and in many more than at home. France is pleased to see a rise in the fertility rate to 2.01 children per woman, just enough to increase the population (supporting immigration) and ensure economic growth. On the contrary, concern should be expressed about an increase in the ecological footprint. Assistance is provided to large families, while a fine will soon have to be paid for each additional child, as a polluter tax is charged to industrialists. There is an immorality of any prohibition imposed on families with regard to their freedom of reproduction.
Read moreA pathological aspect of which our science has not yet clearly pierced the mysteries or surrounded the contours
These are apparently minor pathological aspects. If one were dealing with major pathologies, psychiatry and psychoanalysis could easily have highlighted them and made them recognize them as such by the populations.However, an insidious drift of the psychic state, widespread at the scale of a population, can lead to crowd phenomena of which no one really becomes aware. This is the case of endemic neurosis, discovered by Freud more than a century ago and which everyone has heard about, but which only specialists can identify. Many other disorders can affect populations without anyone being able to characterize them or measure their impact on the course of history.
Read moreA priori as infinite and inexhaustible
Recently, the whole world, leading industrialists, had no awareness of the limitation of the resources offered by the planet. It, with its immense continents, endless oceans and the enormous mass of its atmosphere, seemed an inexhaustible source in comparison with the smallness of man.
Things have evolved in recent decades thanks to the work of scientists and environmentalists, and also thanks to the media: everyone now knows that the planet is limited, that man is able to pollute all the atmosphere to the ozone layer, to cause greenhouse effects capable of disrupting temperatures throughout the globe, to oil entire coasts following the sinking of a single tanker, to pour into the oceans masses of plastic capable of forming a new continent (the Vortex, in the Pacific, already large as ten times France!), to degrade groundwater, to transform the most beautiful forests into gigantic sterile deserts…
Read moreA radically new vision
How is this vision “radically new” to other ecological approaches?
No steps have so far sought the causes of environmentally harmful behaviour in the dysfunctions of human psyche, nor objectively sought the root causes of these dysfunctions. Common sense calls into question “faults” such as greed, selfishness, indifference to nature. Indeed, greed pushes men to seize all possible goods even though they do not really need them. Selfishness pushes them to want everything for them without taking into account neither the other nor the future representatives of the species, nor the other living beings that constitute their environment. Indifference and unconsciousness make them hide the often irreversible damage they cause in the natural environment and think only about their immediate interests.
Read moreA real madness of man
Speaking of madness about our consumer society may seem excessive. Comfort and abundance also bring his satisfactions, it would be butchering his eye as to deny it. When you come back from the supermarket, the trunk filled with victuals, clothes, appliances, electronics, toys for children, plus an advertisement for the next car, you feel a joy that reminds us of the Christmases of childhood. The avalanche of gifts was like a pledge of love, and it’s so good to get back to those happiness despite the wear of time… A satisfaction also to the idea that one can afford all this, that one has reached a certain standing, that one has succeeded in life…but this satisfaction multiplied by fifty weeks a year and by a billion families would suffice to ruin the planet permanently. Inconvenient contradiction that might well hide flaws in our way of thinking life and thinking ourselves.
Read moreAchieving global success
There is currently a very universal popular and pro-environmental media current, which can give us some hope for reducing humanity’s ecological footprint. The question is to what extent these hopes are not so dim. The constant increase in CO2 emissions, the evolution of agriculture, the difficult installation of electric traction and many other blows of sword in the water, are all unreassuring signs…
Pro-ecological measures are indeed facing enormous resistance as soon as they affect the interests of industrialists. Investments and increases in production prices are such that competition is often undurables for those who respect them. No company can reasonably embark on a course leading to bankruptcy.
Read moreAdaptability
The adaptation discussed here takes into account the genetic adaptation capabilities associated with the mechanisms of natural selection (which require many generations), as well as the epigenetic mechanisms (immediate), as well as any adaptive mechanisms that remain to be discovered.
Today it is known that the ability of species to adapt is more important and faster than the first geneticists had imagined. However, any form of adaptability remains limited, like any system, and the question of exceeding the threshold of adaptability remains at the centre of the problem of human-nature interactions. Whenever man invents any artifice, he may have consequences for his own health or that of the natural environment, as soon as the new constraints exceed his own adaptability or those of the different actors in the ecosystem.
Read moreAdaptability limits
The notion of adaptability allows an end to the sterile debate between cultural determinism and genetic determinism. To say that all behavioural attributes come from culture would neglect the innate part of human psychism. To pretend that everything is determined by genes would neglect the share of acquired, induced by culture.
The truth lies between these two extremes: an organism cannot withstand conditions too far from those for which its genetic data guarantee it optimal functioning. But it can adapt to conditions that deviate to a certain limit, corresponding to its adaptability margin.
Read moreAdvanced technologie
The challenge of human ecogenetics is not to undertake research to improve pro-environmental technologies. Many ecologists, renewable energy engineers, habitat specialists and nature protectors are admirably responsible and deserve the full recognition for their initiatives.
The aim here is to objectively search for the factors that have determined the trajectory of our civilization towards a form of progress to this point of destruction. It is by knowing these factors that we will be able to create a general awareness of the cultural errors we are being held in.
Read moreAgriculture
The nuisances of extensive agriculture are now obvious. No one would deny it. His supporters have no other recourse than to invoke the need to increase yields in order to feed an increasingly large humanity. That is to say to go further into the impasse where the world has already committed itself…
The proponents of environmentally friendly agriculture call exactly the opposite. The vicious circle of chemical fertilizers and pesticides needs to be removed as quickly as possible to return to cultivation methods that preserve what remains of the environment. Also avoid over-mechanization in order to break the impasse of oil for the day when there will be more, and the bottomless well of bank borrowing for bankruptcy and economic crises.
Read moreAlready probably in those of our ancestors
We tend to think that the fundamental features of human psyche have always been what they are today. There has of course been great progress, thanks to culture, but the background characteristics would not have changed, nor would a crocodile today be more or less violent than a crocodile of dinosaur times. Ecological evil would thus take root in the very nature of man. It would only crown (with a mortuary crown, in this case…) a slow progression whose guidelines were fixed in advance…
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Nothing is less certain: it is on the contrary possible that some elements that escape us have altered the functioning originating from our psyches. The psychic state depends on many environmental factors: landscapes (as Shepard showed), distance from nature, food, education, cultural constants, social relations, sexual life, promiscuity, constraints of all kinds.Applicable
It is not all about defining solutions, but they must be applicacbles. Applicable in part to the physical environment, i.e. materially possible, and free from further nuisances (e.g. biofuels from cereals); but especially socially applicacbles.
Nothing is more difficult than getting people to change their habits, even more so when it comes to giving up certain benefits. This is where the knowledge of the psychological mechanisms involved in the quest for the various artifacts related to progress and consumerism could prove decisive, paving the way for general awareness. This will not happen in a few days, but other pro-ecological measures may run into indifference or lack of perseverance or even suicidal attitudes, if the root causes of our mistakes in civilization are not clearly denounced.
Read moreArtifacts
According to the Little Robert: artifact =phenomena of human origin, artificial (in the study of natural facts). The word refers to all that man can do to change the natural environment (forestation, agriculture, dams, lighting, fire, culinary art, etc.), to change the behaviour of animals (domestication, traps, hunting, etc.) or their own behaviour (forbidden, obligations, education, conditioning, etc.).
In principle, every artifact aims to improve living conditions. However, as it departs from nature, it can place living species and man himself in situations not foreseen in genetic determinisms. It therefore requires some adaptation of individuals to the new conditions. However, adaptability is limited, so that certain artifacts can have effet-pervers, i.e. harmful consequences that appear in the longer term.
Read moreArtifacts generated by our intelligence
The question may be surprising: man and his intelligence form a whole, stemming from the laws of evolution (or, for some, from the will of a Creator). Intelligence should therefore, like any innate organ or function, work for the good of the species and the environment that guarantees its survival, as is observed for instinct in animals in an ecosystem.
It is clear, however, that man can create, through his intelligence, all kinds of artifacts and new situations to which neither he nor his biotope are adapted. The accumulation of these artifacts can ultimately pose a real threat to all ecosystems and to itself. For example pesticides for agriculture, CFCs for our refrigerators, mercury for our teeth and gold…
Read moreArtifices
The notion of fireworks is not easy to define. Man is by nature intelligent; His intelligence allows him to invent all kinds of fireworks; These artifices are therefore natural since they result from a natural function. However, any artifice by definition departs from natural situations and often contains great nuisances… This is the most blatant contradiction of the human condition, or at least of civilization. After Le Petit Robert: artifice is a skillful, ingenious, and in the most common sense: a deceptive and skillful way to disguise the truth, or even a subtlety made to deceive.
Read moreArts, religions
We generally exempt the arts and religions from any responsibility for environmental harm. In principle, artistic and cultural activities do little damage: churches, cults, musical instruments, books, sculptures, paintings, cinema have little impact on natural balances.
Nevertheless, art and religion are the two main pillars of culture. They form and maintain our relationships with the universe and our earthly environment.
Let us take the Catholic example of the Eucharist: the bread, flesh of Christ, and the wine, blood of Christ, make the dimension of the sacred sound in the minds of the faithful. Whatever the reasons that led Christ to choose these Oblates, the rite repeated regularly for generations ended up covering the two holy foods with sanctity and removing the questions that they might raise.
Read moreAvidity
Food is at the heart of the ecological problem. As Gandhi said a long time ago: “The planet will always be large enough to satisfy everyone’s needs, but too small to satisfy the greed of some.”
It thus drew our attention not only to the emerging ecological impasse, but to the fundamental difference between greed and satisfaction of needs. The greed begins from the moment when the legitimate desire to satisfy a real need is replaced by a desire for free satisfaction, thus by a search for pleasure without it meeting a real need.
Read moreBecoming your own predator
Unfortunately, that is what is happening. Men kill each other cyclically at a rate that far exceeds what all tigers and sharks do. World War I killed 9 million people, and the Second 62 million.
Despite the suffering of such conflicts, they are far from having decisive action on population growth. The number of deaths is, at worst, only a very small percentage of the world’s population, around 2 per cent. The return of peace and more normal living conditions, on the contrary, seems to favour births, as was the case with the baby boom which began in France in 1942.
Read moreBiological Actors
Biological actors, or biocenosis: all living beings present in the biotope, whether they are animal or plant.
Read moreBiological or philosophical contradiction
Philosophers, often more sophistic than “philosophers” in the sense of ancient Greece, manage to demonstrate everything. It is enough for them to invoke, according to the schools, the laws of chance or the evil forces that would inhabit the human soul to justify this amazing contradiction which wants man to have the possibility, even an unfortunate tendency to work for his own evil or for that of his environment.
Some harmonic intuitions, however, allow us to hope in a capacity and a will to do good, or at least hope for a human ideal that works by nature for the harmony of the living. It is difficult to know whether these intuitions are either little or little russelist dating back to a functioning originating from psychism, or rather to a need to flee reality and find compensation and assurances in infantile fantasies.
Read moreBiosphere renewal capabilities
Already formulated in 1842, the concept of biosphere was defined in 1875 by Swiss geologist Suess as the part of the earthly sphere in which life manifests itself.
Read moreCertain distortions of cultural or other origin
Among the factors to be taken into account are from the outset: morals, the canonical image of an accomplished sexuality identified with normal coitus, the occultation of polymorphic impulses, homophobia or prohibitions affecting homosexuality, a certain greed towards enjoyment, acquired or innate repugnance against contraceptives, their difficult access in poor countries, endemic neurosis and paranoia, pornography, etc.
Each of these elements must be carefully studied to measure its actual impact. Then it is necessary to determine its origins and mechanisms if one wants to understand in depth the situation in which the West is in the process of bringing the rest of the world to bear. The issue is not simply to stabilize the population, but to reduce it significantly before a devastated environment takes care of it. This requires a deep understanding of sexual and family behaviours, with their conscious and unconscious roots.
Read moreClassical ecology
Traditional ecology stops studying biological balances and disorders in different biotopes, and denounces the abuse of the environment by human activities. Human ecogenetics is interested in the root causes that have led people to a form of progress that is particularly harmful to the environment. Ecopsychology has already proposed this task, but has focused on the therapeutic aspects of environmental relations.
The aim here is to examine not only the constitutional characteristics of the human being which are at the origin of the choices of anti-ecological behavior (natural tendencies to appropriation, laziness, indifference…), but mainly the psychic dysfunctions which lead to environmental nuisances (hypertrophy of the ego, loss of natural empathy, permeability to advertising speeches…).
Read moreCognitive or psychoaffective dysfunction
The aim is not only to determine what mental dysfunctions can cause environmental degradation, but also to look for their causes. It is by going back to the roots of the disorders concerned that it will be possible to remedy it, just as knowledge of the causes of a disease is essential to implement a basic treatment.
Read moreCompatible with the genetic data of the living world and with the happiness of the individual
The doctrine of cultural relativism, which has occupied a great deal of place in anthropology of the past century, is not scientifically founded. It holds more of an ideology that would give man complete freedom of conduct, and neglects the limits imposed by our genome.
A culture based on the use of alcohol causes damage. The peasant practices of sleeping babies by putting a tampon impregnated with water of life in their mouth had catastrophic consequences for psychic development. Alcoholism has done and continues to wreak havoc in our society. Similarly smoking, a source of cancer and cardiovascular disease with their countless tragedies. One cannot sweep the problem of a back of the hand, saying that any form of culture is good.
Read moreConsumerism and Growth
These two irrefragable characteristics of our modern society, le-consumerisme-et-la-croissance, are perceived as a kind of fatal happiness. Without growth, the global economy collapses, and without consumption, individual or family happiness is seriously challenged. In other words, it makes sense for growth and consumption to make us happy. However, the question arises as to why we have come to this point, knowing that growth and consumption condemn us to choose between economic disaster and environmental disaster, without yet bringing us the deep satisfactions to which we aspire. With on the contrary collateral damage such as sedentaryness, obesity, diseases of civilization, loneliness in the crowd, financial burdens, economic crises, inner vacuum…
Read moreContinue an action known to threaten the future of the planet
Demonstrating that human activity threatens the planet is not enough to stop it. Far from it!
Tropical forests have long been known to play an important role in atmospheric oxygenation and CO2 capture; they continue to be massacred at the rate of once the surface of Costa Rica each year; Some countries are clearing up with giant plantations of young trees supposed to slow the process, even though artificial forests do not replace primary forests in terms of biodiversity.
Read moreCourses of millennia
Major environmental changes begin mainly with agriculture and livestock. These great changes date back to the early days of the Neolithic period, between 11,000 and 3,000 years B.C.E. in different parts of the world. The markers of this real revolution are mainly polished stone outils, pottery and domestication of animal and plant species (cereals).
Human ecogenetics takes into account all the changes introduced by man, without neglecting the conquest of fire, much older (about 400,000 years). Each of the human inventions that have settled in tradition and today constitute our civilization must be questioned as to their effects on the environment, but also as to the influences that they may have exerted directly or indirectly on human psychism and our behaviour.
Read moreCousteau
Although it is a universally known figure in the world of ecology, it is indeed that of Commander Cousteau. Without it, today’s politicians would never be so aware of the damage to the seabed as a result of human activities.
Less is known about the thoughts that worked on him shortly before his death in 1997:“A balanced land and humanity would be a population of one hundred to five hundred million people, but educated and capable of self-subsistence. Population ageing is not the problem. That is a terrible thing to say, but to stabilize the world’s population, we must lose 350,000 people a day. It’s a horrible thing to say, but not to say it is even more.”
Read moreCreation of consciousness
Nothing is possible in the long term and on a global scale without a collective awareness of the ecological problem and its root causes. It is not by caring for symptoms that aggravation of a disease is avoided by eliminating its causes.
Human ecogenetics proposes to go back to the roots of the current environmental impasse. Such research leads to the functions and dysfunctions of human psychism, knowing that it is fascination with an invention, the taste of least effort, the strength of habit, selfish interests and indifference to nature that are primarily at stake.
Read moreCultural level and access to contraceptives
More educated parents, aware of the mechanisms of fertilization, are certainly better able to avoid accidental conceptions. That is why we can certainly rely on better education to stop the demographic explosion.
Several flats, however:
Education goes hand in hand with access to progress. The proliferation of cultural contacts inevitably leads to the desire to share the benefits of developed countries. Progress in education will, therefore, jointly lead to an explosion in consumption, which will cost the world well before the birth-rate slowdown has resulted in a reduction in the population.
Read moreCultural, psychological and social environment
Human behaviour is likely to be determined more by the cultural and social context than by the physical environment (as long as it is bearable). The way in which decisions are made, choices are made, nature and life in general, depends directly on the psychic structures, i.e. on the multiple conditioning and trauma experienced in early childhood.
It is therefore essential, if we want to change the relationship between man and the environment, to first determine what are the features involved in the psychic structure, and then to look at what are the cultural values or constraints responsible for these distortions.
Read moreDamage to Nature
The term “nature” is not used here in an ideological sense, nor idealized, assuming an original perfection as defended for example by a Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Nature is sometimes beneficent, preserving a harmony that has been established during the immemorial times of evolution, sometimes destructive, threatening, ruthless…
The contradiction arises, at least in part, if one distinguishes between nature-life, governed by biological and ecological balances archimillennial, and nature-matter, with its meteorites, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and other forms of cataclysms often destructive of life. Nature-matter is governed by the laws of chance, and inevitably tends towards disorder (increasing entropy), while nature-life results from a slow and constant organization through the filters of natural selection, ensuring in principle an ever more complex and perfect order.
Read moredemographic transition
Demographers, not knowing how to stop the explosion of the world’s population or reassure their audiences, fall back on the model of the “demographic transition”, defined as follows:
After a long period of poverty, people who suddenly benefit from improved living conditions as a result of advances in industry and agriculture are experiencing a first phase of population growth, mainly due to longer lifespan. Then the “changing habits” associated with the new standing would encourage individuals to limit the number of births during a second phase. This would establish a post-transitional period, maintaining an almost constant population, avoiding overexploitation of the environment.
Read moreDemography itself could explode much faster
The fundamental question is: what are the psychological, psychosocial or psychosexual mechanisms that keep the proliferation of a population within acceptable limits?
Can it be admitted that the consideration of family budget problems, the desire to have descendants of his blood, the joy of raising children, the risk of overpopulation and other elements related to vital possibilities are integrated by the individual in a conscious way, that he wants only a number of children corresponding, on average, to the economic possibilities of the society to which he belongs?
Read moreDependence
Dependence is a psychological mechanism that is found in most common situations: dependency of parents, dependency of a boss, sexual dependence, dependence on money, comfort, eating habits, a place of life, etc.
It is necessary to distinguish between real dependency, that which comes from the need for certain elements to live and flourish, and the feeling of dependence which is entirely subjective. You can depend on an external factor and feel that you do not depend on it, or that you do not depend on it and still feel dependants. One will think that he is in control of his eating habits, and will not discover his dependence until he is deprived of it. Another will feel dependants on his car to do his shopping, while he might very well do them on foot.
Read moreDepression
Depression is more widespread than we think in our modern society. It can be understood as the paroxysmic and individualized expression of an evil being that we all feel. It translates, in some more fragile individuals, the larval dissatisfaction of a life form that does not bring us what we deeply aspire to.
Rather than treating depressions with psychotropic substances, we must first ask ourselves what their real origin is. A disease never settles by chance. We need pathogens and favorable terrain. The depressants certainly have the ground, but this must not make us hide the external causes of their condition. These are usually on the side of disappointments in love, family situations or professional setbacks.
Read moreDesir
Desire is often seen as synonymous with vital momentum. Between the different philosophers, psychologists, psychoanalysts and linguists, not to mention the common sense, unity is never the rule when it comes to defining the fundamental elements of psychism. Epicure distinguished the necessary desires (food, protection, sleep, etc.), natural desires (search for pleasant=), artificial desires (richness, glory…), and unrealizable desires (immortality). The Church associated with them the capital sins: food?gourmandise, flesh?concupiscence, rest?paresse, money?cupidity, power?ambitiousness, honor?.
Read moreDubbed every two generations
It would be imprudent to extrapolate this growth, and to say that the world population should have quadrupled by the end of the century.
Many factors may occur in the meantime. Some demographers propose the model of “demographic transition”: after a long period of poverty, medical and industrial progress, rising standards of living and education increase both life expectancy and birth rate, so that the population grows rapidly; The resultant changes in habits would lead to a reduction in the birth rate, so that the population would stabilize.
Read moreEcological Disaster
Some will object that the term disaster is exaggerated. We can still eat and breathe. Temperatures remain bearable, there have always been climate accidents over the ages. The level of the oceans has varied much more in the past. With a good anti-UV cream, you sunbathe safely on the beaches, the hole in the ozone layer seems to recede. In any case, environmental activists are responsible for solving all these environmental problems…
Read moreEcological Disaster, n°2
Can we really talk about ecological disaster?
At present, the optimists believe: “Life is proceeding without too many incidents. The environment is sometimes used, but ecological balances are really broken only in relatively small areas. Some species have disappeared, but life is full of resources, biodiversity is recovering in one way or another. It is true that chemical pollution is found all over the world, to the poles and the bottom of the oceans, but its effects on organisms are localized and certainly reversible…
Read moreEcological disorders
Environmental disorders are generally seen as a consequence of civilization-specific activities, and this is the result of an inevitable evolution of culture.
We tend to place our Western culture at the top of all cultures, to conceive it as a sort of fulfilment of the potentialities of human nature. On the contrary, human ecogenetics raises the question of a psychopathological origin of this form of progress. Some mental disorders, whose contours have yet to be precisely defined, are the cause of environmental disorders.
Read moreEcology
Ecology is now a full science. Human actions, in addition to natural factors, have direct and indirect consequences for the environment, with boomerang effects and cascades of disorders most often unpredictable. The complexity of natural laws is made even more impenetrable by the disruptions of primitive harmony. Only a scientific approach can decipher the biological and physical mechanisms that interfere and add up their effects.
Conventional ecology is still far from having penetrated all aspects of its field of investigation. The aim of human ecogenetics is to explore a domain that has remained obscure to date: that of the root causes of environmental degradation related to the functioning of human psychism and even more to its dysfunctions. Then in a second step, identify the causes of these malfunctions whatever they may be.
Read moreEcopsychology
The aim of ecopsychology is to study the relationship between the environment and the psychic state of the human being. A harmful context can cause all kinds of diseases, more than ever in the era of pollution. Ecopsychology studies not only the effects of the environment on psychological functioning, but also seeks the behaviours, mentalities and cultural values that are at the root of the ecological crisis.
Human ecogenetics, however, is taking one more step by distinguishing “progenetic” values, i.e. those which correspond to the genetic potential of human beings and other species, from “antigenetic” values, which subject organisms to conditions to which they are not genetically adapted. Modern concepts of evolutionary biology and psychology are thus taken into account and underpin more fundamental reasoning and heuristics.
Read moreEffective
An ever more efficient treatment of funds than palliative treatment. But what exactly does the term “efficiency” mean? In medicine, solutions aimed at preserving the environment will be more efficient if they go back to the root causes, as they will have uncovered the entire causal chain rather than taking immediate links.
Does the importance given to hygiene, for example, which is the cause of a huge waste of plastic in the large distribution, correspond to a reality? Is it not rather the manifestation of a mental dysfunction, of an obsessive tendency whose cause should be sought in educational errors, in social constraints, or even in psychophysiologiques disorders induced by environmental changes, such as excessive fragility in the face of microbes induced by an inappropriate lifestyle?
Read moreEgocentrism
A consumerism which is indifferent to the damage it entails for the environment is the direct expression of egocentrism. Everyone thinks about their own advantages, comfort, new car, future residence and neglects the consequences that this can have in the longer term and on a wider scale.
To this egocentrism opposes the awareness that the individual should experience not only of nature, but also of others and future generations. That is, the ability to put oneself in the place of others and to feel what they feel: empathy.
Read moreelucidating the precise causes of these changes
The immediate causes of the phenomena are generally addressed. For example, consumerism is attributed to human greed, and indifference to its ecological consequences is attributed to selfishness. And they think they’ve said everything.
However, it is questionable whether this apparently incoercible greed and selfishness, at least on the scale of the masses, are an integral part of human nature. If this is the case, we are confronted with a state of fact, an internal contradiction of the laws of equilibrium that usually govern ecosystems.
Read moreEntache our civilization
All the myths seem to indicate that we would have lost an original paradise: was it a paradise environment, as may be nature when it is respected? A state of being that would have been that of our ancestors, and who should be ours? Or do myths tell us a state to which we must strive to ensure a sense of our existence? These questions, which are ontologically fundamental, although rather hermetic to a scientific approach, deserve careful consideration.
Read moreEnvironment and civilization
Our modern civilization is not the first to put the natural environment at risk. Archaeology tells us that many of the most “advanced” ethnic groups have self-destructed as a result of overexploitation.
Is this situation intrinsically linked to the human condition and development of any culture? Would it not be possible to define a form of civilization that satisfies our natural aspirations while preserving the environment? Why and how do we coexist in a culture its benefits and its misdeeds, its acquisitions and illusions, its creative aspects and its morbid aspects? Are environmental factors the same as those that affect the physical or mental health of individuals?
Read moreEpide-la-genetique
Genetics, in the sense of all genes, does not determine everything. It soon became apparent that complex mechanisms such as methylation can activate or inactivate certain genes, in order to regulate the anatomical or functional characteristics that they are supposed to determine. Some of these mechanisms are environmentally induced and transmissible, so that the innate characteristics can adapt to environmental changes without modifying the genes themselves. The study of these mechanisms is the subject of epide-la-genetique.
Read moreEssential
The impression that an artifice is indispensable or not depends primarily on psychological factors and choices of life.
For example, heating is essential in cold areas, but the fact of settling and residing in cold areas results from a choice, or from certain historical constraints stemming from choices made, for example, by invaders. A powerful car seems essential to many people, while a change of attitude is sufficient to satisfy a less polluting model. Cereal monocultures, with all their ecological nuisances, multiplied with intensive livestock farming, while grass-fed animals would be better for health and the environment.
Read moreEvery human activity must be reconsidered
It is even necessary to take into account activities which do not appear to have a priori an impact on the environment, and also those which seem indispensable.
It is behind these two screens that one may tend to occult harmful activities, either that one does not yet know their actual ecological consequences, or that they are part of the norm to the point that we do not think of questioning them. Consideration should even be given to the possibility of interaction between clean and environmentally harmful activities.
Read moreExponentiality
What do we call an exponential?
It is a very simple mathematical function, which you apply without thinking about it every time you calculate the interest composed of your book A…
Example: if each year you earn 10% interest (it would be more realistic for a loan than for a savings book, but finally…), the 1000 euros you had in January will be increased to 1100 at the end of December. Then you let him bring it back again. Your new gain will be 10% out of €1100, and your account will rise in December to: 1100 + 110 = €1210.
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Then for the following year: 1210 + 121 = 1331.
After five years, you will be at €1610.51.
After ten years, you will reach €2593.74
After fifteen years, at: €4177.25
After twenty years, at: €6727.50
After fifty years, at: €117390.85
After one hundred years, at: €13 780 612.34…Exporting to Third World Countries
With the media available today, everything that represents ease and luxury exports at the speed of light to the last corners of the globe. The phenomenon will further accelerate with the penetration of television and the Internet into the deepest segments of the population. Who would not dream of beautiful cars, state-of-the-art appliances, more efficient computers, and a thousand other sources of pollution when direct and indirect advertising (such as fictional films as well as documentaries) takes us day after day with its incoercible baits?
Read moreExtending and amplifying population growth
Ecological and agricultural measures aimed at optimising the current exploitation of the planet will obviously reduce the date when resource scarcity will limit population growth. During the time gained, humanity could continue to proliferate, and more and more people would indulge in Western food habits. As a result, needs will increase, land, water and fertilizer will be increasingly needed, deforestation will become increasingly necessary, land will erode, and the environment will deteriorate in the same way as in ancient civilizations.
Read moreExtrapolation
Extrapolation is defined in mathematics as predicting the value of a function assuming that it continues to vary as it has previously varied.
If you don’t know an example that the level of a groundwater table drops by one metre each year, you can extrapolate this variation and tell you that it will have dropped by one metre more a year later. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work: if an unusual drought or rain occurs in the meantime, or new drilling runs out faster, or if it is completely exhausted (there, it won’t fall down) etc. Extrapolation is valid only if all things remain equal elsewhere. Otherwise, it can lead to serious mistakes.
Read moreFamine, disease and war
According to the , population growth is the “major factor in increasing food needs”. A source of increasing pressure on natural resources that is difficult, expensive or slowly renewable, it must – according to the UN – be controlled to ensure durables development, which requires food security and political stability. Rapid stabilization of the world population is a prerequisite for durables food security
Let us try to represent what will happen once there is no more arable land to feed everyone. It is no longer a starved minority that will have to be kept on a leash, but the majority of the occupants of the planet… And when we don’t have anything to eat anymore, and some better lotted neighbors still eat at ease, what’s going to happen?
Read moreFascination
We are fascinated by all kinds of things: ideas, beliefs, individuals, but also by objects, luxury, power, wealth, comfort.
However, we are not all fascinated to the same degree. We also see our own tendency to fascination vary with age, experiences, habit, psychotropics. It is therefore a psychological function that depends on some complex factors on which little is actually known.
The tendency towards fascination plays an essential role in consumerism and ecology. Every time we invent a new artifact, fascination mixes and pushes us forward. It may be stimulating and perhaps necessary, but it may also dazzle us and make us hide the nuisances or insanity of our inventions. Publicists are constantly playing on this register to make us buy such a new car, such a new laundry, such a new pesticide.
Read moreFear
Fear is an essential psychological function: it stimulates our vigilance and makes us act in case of danger. However, it can go beyond measurement and paralyze or make mistakes. It plays an important role in our relationship to others and the environment.
The fear that the ecological disaster can inspire will undoubtedly be decisive in how humanity will change its behaviour. It is she who can awaken consciences and force indifferent ones to open their eyes and ears. An excess of fear, on the other hand, may lead to psychological defences, such as excess pessimism or optimism, justification for harmful behaviour, resignation reactions, aggressive, destructive, suicidal.
Read moreFirst causes
**Why talk about root causes? **
Because the aim of human ecogenetics is not to seek the immediate causes of human damage to the environment.
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These causes are now well known: deforestation, monocultures, pesticides, synthetic chemistry, dioxin, PCBs, CFC, greenhouse gas emissions, overpopulation, waste, waste in nature, landfills, etc. We must do something other than promote environmental protection measures.
The transition from fossil to renewable energies, from agrochemistry to organic cultivation, from polluting leaching to ecological leaching, and other ongoing efforts are essential and need to be supported. But they don’t solve the bottom line. They do not go back to the root causes of consumerist drift and will only involve more or less idealistic minorities. They will certainly not avoid the contamination of emerging countries by the factors responsible for our own sinking.First days
Any effect has a cause. If the effect is to be removed, the cause must be removed. If one does not know the cause, or if it is not possible to remove it, one can only act on the effect, so as to mitigate it. But then we are reduced to mere palliation, and the situation is not fundamentally resolved. If circumstances permit, the same cause may reactivate the same effect, and palliative means may have their own effet-pervers.
Read moreFirst step
Talking about a “first step” may seem ambitious. Yet it is not pointless to draw attention to a crucial question: what are the ecopsychological processes that led to the evolution of our civilization towards a planetary ecological impasse?
We do not know much about the reasons why our civilization has embarked on this apparently dead-end path. It is also unclear whether the means used will prevent the descent to hell. It is therefore essential to examine objectively the psychological contingencies which have generated our way of life and which still make us dependants on it today, to the point that we feel that this way of life belongs to the very nature of man.
Read moreFood abundance, confidence in the future
Parents who feel safe and able to feed their offspring in good conditions tend in principle to make more children than otherwise.
When it is known that food will be lacking, that there will be no drinking water for everyone, that conflicts will put lives at risk, a natural reflex would spontaneously limit the number of children desired.This reaction can explain the phase of demographic explosion that is observed in the first period of demographic transition, when new progress comes to reassure and energize minds. On the other hand, it is illusory to infer the reciprocal: in a situation of stress, the most natural reflex is instead to multiply the progeny in order to give the species a maximum chance of survival.
Read moreFrom natural functioning to human psychism
One tends to think, under the influence of cultural relativism, that human conduct can take a thousand different forms under the aegis of different cultures, and that it is equal that one or the other is adopted. It is neglecting a fact of crucial importance: that psychism follows certain guidelines imposed by the de-la-genetique of each species. We certainly have free will, a certain capacity for distancing ourselves from our instinctive reactions, with a magnitude generally unknown to the animal. However, certain situations or behaviours are unbearable and leave irreversible traces. The very notion of trauma presupposes a limitation of psychoaffective adaptability to events beyond individual tolerance limits. And these limits, although varying from one individual to another, remain confined to a range of variation that is itself limited, species specific and genetically transmitted.
Read moreFunctioning of human psychism and its possible dysfunctions
The operation of any system, whether mechanical, biological or psychological, implies the possibility of malfunctions. All behaviour is based on a psychic process. It is therefore ultimately the very functioning of the human psyche that must be scrutinized and, in particular, its possible dysfunctions.
It can be expected that behaviour that compromises natural balances will result in unnatural psychological functioning. This even if we are a priori convinced to be perfectly normal. Such a conviction is not certain, it is quite naive and egocised: all the fools think they are normal…
Read moreFundamental question
Concerned about the functioning of the human mind while environmental degradation is very concrete things may seem incongruous. However, this is certainly the key to the problem.
The general tendency to seek comfort, luxury, ease, money, power, freedom, security, consideration, enjoyment in all areas is the very engine of our consumer society. Not that we had to live without all the benefits of progress, it would also be contrary to human nature.
Read moreGenetic determinism
Genetic determinism would like all psyche functioning data to be determined by genes. On the contrary, cultural determinism assumes that characters and behaviours are determined by culture.
These two extreme theses each hold a share of truth. Certain fundamental components of behaviour are found in all cultures: fear, aggressiveness, trust, mistrust, imitation, opposition, the basis of language, etc. are clearly universal characteristics of human beings and therefore most likely genetically determined, regardless of the influences of culture. Other components are highly variable and very accurately reflect education and social constraints. Only certain predispositions can then be determined genetically.
Read moreGenetic potential
Genetic potential brings together both the functioning data and the adaptability of a species. The adaptability of the individual or species to new constraints thus knows limits that cannot be transgressed without consequences.
Human beings, thanks to their intelligence, can create situations that exceed their own adaptability and also endanger other species. Since the conquest of fire, many individuals have had the opportunity to burn themselves, and yet our resistance to burns has not changed compared to that of the higher monkeys, we more easily present infections or other complications.
Read moreGenetics
For more information on the concept of de-la-genetique and genomes: Genetics (Wikipedia)
Human ecogenetics seeks the still unknown links between ecology, de-la-genetique and dysfunctions of human psychism.
All organisms involved in an ecosystem are largely determined by their genes. They have a certain capacity to adapt to new situations, but this adaptability is limited. Man, endowed with superior intelligence, is the first creature able to impose on the natural environment constraints that never existed before. The question therefore arises, in the face of each human artifact, whether or not it exceeds the adaptability of the species involved, ranging from man himself to the whole ecosystem.
Read moreGlobal ecosystem
The planetary ecosystem includes all life forms and environments on the planet. They are interdependants, as the pollution revealed: agricultural chemical treatments on the continents have the effect of poisoning Inuit through seal and whale fat…
Without going as far as Lovelock, who sees the planet as a living being in its own right, we must consider the global ecosystem as a whole when it comes to the impact of human activities on the biosphere. The level of the different pollution classes and the number of humans are now so high that the entire planet is ultimately affected by human artifacts, even if they seem anodizing at the individual scale.
Read moreGlobal ecosystem 2
Each region of the globe separated by any geological barrier constitutes an apparently independants biotope, with its own ecosystem. The species developed there coexisted, and evolved according to each other, arriving at a balance ensuring the survival of all. The planet can thus consider itself a mosaic of relatively independants ecosystems.
Things change from the moment when important exchanges occur between different ecosystems. This is the case with air pollution on which the entire planet depends, or with ocean pollution which, according to the sea currents, changes from one ocean to another. Men are not the only ones responsible: large volcanic eruptions, or falls of meteors have regularly obscured the sky all over the globe. The situation is even worse today, with industrial and consumer pollution spreading its waste day after day throughout the biosphere.
Read moreHis reasons for being
When we act in one way or another, it seems to us most of the time that it goes without saying. We are conditioned by our education, immersed in a context in which everyone respects certain standards, and as long as we conform to the patterns of ambient behaviour, we have the feeling of acting normally, of being in our right, of not being able to do otherwise.
It is not easy to take the necessary step back to question our usual behaviour. You have to learn to be wary of traditions, dare think differently, get rid of the fear of not doing as others do. Perhaps we even have to counter certain fundamental impulses, inscribed in our psychic programming to ensure that we respect the rituels of a group.
Read moreHuman Ecogenetics
The term “ecogenetic” brings together ecology and de-la-genetique. The relationship between the species’ genetic data and environmental data is indeed to be studied.
The action of a species always has an impact on the environment, and changes in the environment in turn affect the data of the species. It must adapt either immediately or in the longer term through a change in its genetic heritage. The guiding axis of ecogenetics thus understood is co-evolution, i.e. the reciprocal influence of environmental changes and genetic changes.
Read morehuman nature in itself, or rather its culture-induced avatars
All our behaviors are intrinsically linked to our psychic functioning. This operation is partly innate, partly conditioned by education, morals, the various social and environmental constraints.
Whenever behaviour is problematic, the question arises as to the extent to which it is derived from the innate characteristics of human psychism, as genetically programmed, or whether it is derived on the contrary from certain conditionings or other factors which may have altered the psychic structures in relation to what it should be.
Read moreHuman Sciences
The sciences-humaines bring together all the knowledge concerning the human being: psychology, philosophy, epistemology, anthropology, archaeology, history, mythology, theology, art, medicine, sexology, psychoanalysis, parapsychology, etc.
Each of these multiple disciplines is concerned with advances in human ecogenetics, as all facets of human behaviour interact with the environment in the broad sense (physical, social and cultural).
Read moreIllusion
In good rationalists, we are convinced that matter is a reality, and that the spiritual world, or at least the world that some call magic, is an illusion.
It is clear that one cannot buy a car by the action of the mind alone, and that one must use the matter itself to move on foot. Without any muscle at the key, our mind could not even express itself. Matter therefore plays an irrefragable role, even in matters of spirituality. Yet, we do not take the latest limousine that has been paid for its old days, nor even the muscles that have allowed us to live and act throughout life.
Read moreImposing that individuals only have one child per family
The example of China is evocative: the communist government decided in 1979 to ban families from having more than one child per family, with a colossal fine. In rural areas, a second child was allowed in case the first was a girl. The measure was in itself reasonable in the face of the risk of depletion of land, water and energy resources.
What about thirty years later? The number of children per woman increased from 5.8 to 1.8. Murders of female babies have increased, as have forced sterilizations and abortions (500 million). Partial digital success was therefore achieved at the cost of terrible human drama. In a democratic country, the voices of the people would never have tolerated such a measure.
Read moreIndependants
Any artifice brings an advantage, real or subjective, otherwise it would not have been introduced. For example, grape pressing and vinification allow grape juice to be preserved for very long periods. The wine therefore has, beyond its ritual value, an objective advantage, especially in the absence of a refrigerator.
However, the significant absorption of alcohol, not predicted genetically, has serious health consequences. To the direct dependence of a preservative whose suppression would be disadvantageous, add an dependence due to effet-pervers, as a result of genetic inadaptation of the brain to withstand high blood alcohol levels.
Read moreIndifference to the ecological consequences of our actions
Everyone is divided between concern not to harm the environment, and concern for their own interests. Individual forces are found as a sort of integral, or summation, at the level of all humanity. The balance between the two opposing forces will determine the future of the planet.
It is therefore urgent to question the content of these two trends. For example, many campers or picnicrs leave their garbage in the middle of nature, in perfect indifference. It is clear, however, that the future users of the place will find it deflowered and that this is causing them some damage. It is surprising that after all the media campaigns that have popularized the desire for cleanliness, the process continues to a great extent.
Read moreInducing environmental or physical disorders
The notion of disorder is defined in relation to an order, defined itself by certain laws.
The molecules of a crystal (e.g. sodium chloride, or cooking salt) are distributed in a precise geometric order: all atoms are placed at the top of small cubes aligned in all three dimensions; This order gives way to disorder when the crystal is dissolved in water or melted by heat, particles no longer obey any simple rule and move randomly (unforeseen).
Read moreInteractions
Reciprocal influence such as modification of a first system causes modification of the second system is called interaction, and modification of the second system also causes modification of the first system.
These include changes that humans may or may not voluntarily impose on the environment (forest clearing, desertification, road construction, CO2 emissions, chemical diffusion, food processing, etc.) and changes that are applied in return to the physical and psychological state of individuals (allergics, pathologies, malnutrition, stress, poisoning, changes in psychological structure, changes in behaviour, etc.).
Read moreIntimately related to the functioning of human psychism
Our representations, reasoning and decisions are the basis of all our behaviour. Our positions depend directly on the functioning of our psyche, especially our psycho-affective state. Our inclinations, our passions, our detestations, our anxieties largely determine our choices. Social thought is far from coincident with logical thought, and it was probably even more true at the time when the foundations of our culture were laid, before rationalism took over religious or other beliefs.
Read moreInventive conceptions are statistically inevitable
For clarity of reasoning, we must consider protected and unprotected relationships separately. The latter obviously have an immediate impact on the probability of fertilization. But protected sex cannot be ruled out, simply because none of the contraceptives are 100% safe. A certain proportion of them lead, against the will of the protagonists, to unexpected fertilizations. The figures given by different surveys indicate a range of 20-40%.
The number of unwanted children is reduced by the effect of voluntary terminations of pregnancy. But the majority of gestations are coming to an end, even all in countries hostile to abortion. Moreover, many regions of the world still have limited access to contraceptives. Not to mention the repulsiveness of some individuals, especially among young people.
Read moreInventivity
Man prides himself on being inventive. He is proud of his ability to find unprecedented solutions to all the problems of existence, to create countless artifacts supposed to make his life more enjoyable and safer. This is what makes it superior to the animal, whose instincts remain almost static on relatively stereotypical behaviors.
However, any invention may present dangers: it is impossible to predict in advance the consequences that any innovation will have on ourselves and on our environment. The car soon seemed to be just a wonder for us to travel, and everyone was happy or envious of the owners of beautiful limousines. A hundred years later, we realize that it poisons life in our cities, that we are forced to flee… in cars to go breathe air and silence the countryside. Besides pollution and its consequences for global warming. Today we can wonder if we really won the change…
Read moreL’ ecological borrowing
The concept was defined by Balois Mathis Wackernagel and his team about fifteen years ago in California. “Ecological footprint” refers to all the irreversible traces a population leaves in its biotope. Further information: >>>
The ecological footprint is therefore defined in terms of environmental biocapacity, in all the different areas of environmental damage. In order for an ecosystem to remain in equilibrium, the footprint left must be zero or very low, i.e., the removals and removals can be compensated and absorbed as they occur, without any accumulation or degradation.
Read moreLévi-Strauss
Father of structuralism and forerunner environmentalist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died in 2009 at the age of 100, was pessimistic about a planet he said was exhausted and ravaged by mass civilization. A non- militant ecologist, the philosopher and ethnologist was a tireless advocate of the diversity of cultures and their environment. He was the first to stress so much the privileged link between the so-called primitive peoples and the environment, and to praise through them the nature, diversity and complexity of the world. »
Read moreLike Europeans
or less than 500 million if they were to live like Americans…
At the rate of Internet contamination, “progress” is spreading everywhere, like an epidemic and incurable disease!
Read moreLooseness
A priori, there should be little relationship between a defect of character such as cowardice and the much more concrete problem of the environment.
Yet, if one looks at it more closely, it takes a good deal of courage to recognize the mistakes made against nature and above all to renounce harmful habits. It is through a form of cowardice that the individual refuses to embark on the necessary changes of conduct on the pretext that others have not yet embarked on it. We are at the very centre of the resistances that hinder ecological awareness.
Read moreLove and sexual impulses
First question: how is it that sexual impulses are intrinsically linked to loving impulses?
The classic explanation is that love is the catalyst of procreation. However, Eros often points his arrow at individuals unable to reproduce, either for a question of menopause or for a question of homosexuality. Fertilization is also possible without any love, through simple seduction or even rape.
Unlike man, an animal male is, for the vast majority of species, never attracted by a female outside the fertilization periods. Human love would therefore be an exception to the rule. If it is not intrinsically linked to the needs of fertilization, then why does it so generally involve copulation?
Read moreMal-being
This is the title of Freud’s famous work (1929), which attempts to look around the problem. His analysis is remarkable for the time.
Although some question his “pansexual” approach to human psyche, the causes of ill-being that he sees in the Oedipian refoulement cannot be simply erased. Our society is clearly experiencing a sexual problem, and this aspect of things cannot be overlooked when it comes to an inventory of the causes of mental dysfunction.
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Endemic neurosis can at least partially explain the widespread feelings of frustration that drive consumerism. The Freudian theory of sublimation gives an explanation of the exaggerated importance that individuals manifest for all kinds of material objects. A sports car can well compensate for a lack of love dating back to early childhood. An attraction for the consumption of animal milk could reflect the trauma of the baby at the time of withdrawal, or as a result of a lack of breastfeeding.Measures that seriously slow birth
It would already be difficult to obtain a commitment from all the countries of the world to limit the fertility rate to two children per woman. However, it is, to a few percent, the rate that would prevent the demographic curve from flying even higher.
Even in our exemplary France at the beginning of 2013, authorities and media were unanimously pleased to see this rate rise to 2.01 – a witness to vigorous growth.
Read moreModifications of psychic functioning
The great alternative is this: are the destructive behaviors of the environment, those that have led to deforestation, pollution, consumerism, global warming and other ecological damage derived from the innate characteristics of human psychism? Or, rather, changes in the psychic state as a result of factors that remain to be determined?
In the first case, we must deplore the imperfection of our de-la-genetique, which gives us a brain limited to the point of being unable to predict the distant consequences of our actions. We have the unfortunate tendency, when we invent a new artifice, to see only the goal immediately pursued, and to hide the effet-pervers that it might have in the long term.
Read moreMost humans
The ecological problem is more than a problem of political majority. With the proliferation of humanity, it will be enough for a minority to continue to pollute the seas and the atmosphere to make the disaster irreversible. Unfortunately, this pollution occurs largely in private life, or behind the borders of a state, so that international decisions may not necessarily bring all actors back to reason.
The only solution is to create a general awareness which leads everyone to see objectively the inanity of behaviour directly or indirectly destructive of the environment. Perhaps it will be necessary to fry the debacle closely, to see whole countries suffering from drought and other weather, people dying of hunger and threatening the most affluent, the galloping radioactivity condemning vast areas, the sky darkening with reckless burning to the point of endangering all the cultures of the planet to the family garden…
Read moreMove up in the chain of potential causalities
In Shepard’s view, the daily spectacle of a nature that was redone in the image of man would have had a profound influence on the psyche of the first village farmers. Wild nature beyond cultivated fields is synonymous with danger, every game eruption evokes a loss of harvest, every drought or hail shower is synonymous with famine, every great predator inspires fear of death.
In contrast, the village sheltered from bad weather and wild animals, the fenced field guaranteed to eat to its hunger, the cultures extended the power of the tool, symbolizing the mastery of man over the primitive world. Thus, there is a shift in the sense of values, an illusion of dominating nature, a security in the artificial environment, leaving an ever greater place to disregard the original environment and the illusions of urbanization with its false needs and ecological cost.
Read moreMultiple victims
The more crazy we are, the more fun we have…
The old maxim is no longer a bet. On the contrary, we should say: the more mad people, the more suffering there will be. Our follies today will be paid for by our offspring. The more we have contributed to the proliferation of the human species, the more serious the disaster will be, and the more many will suffer the dramatic consequences.
Read moreNeglected by the scientific world
As disturbing as it may seem, the scientific world does not question many human behaviors, at least not by referring them to possible mental dysfunction.
Most researchers start from the point of view that the human being is what he is, that his defects are constitutional, inherent in the imperfections of nature, the limits of de-la-genetique, and in any case inevitable. Anthropologists, for example, most often oppose rather violently (under the guise of cultural relativism) the idea that one culture may be better than another, which prevents us from immediately asking questions about the system of values inherent in our present culture.
Read moreNeither increased life expectancy
We know with good precision l life expectancy from 1750. In the Middle Ages and until about 1780, it was between 25 and 30 years old. It was only from 1800 that she undertook a dizzying ascent, to reach 80 years of age today, most probably thanks to advances in medicine.
The increase in the population which was seen to settle at the end of the 17th century and to continue until around 1780 was therefore not satisfactorily explained. It is most likely due to a multiplication of births, whose cause must be sought. It is indeed possible that this cause remained underlying the demographic explosion as it began at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and is still present today, for example, inducing resistance against any demographic recession.
Read moreNeurosis
Psychoanalytic definition of neurosis: A disorder resulting from an unconscious conflict between the subject’s impulses and the prohibitions against their achievements.
precisely: the impulses emitted by That, especially certain sexual impulses, are pushed back under the influence of the prohibitions present in the Surmoi, and end up expressing through abnormal ways. These deflected impulses do not alter the Self, who simply finds the anomaly of neurotic behavior, without knowing how to resolve the conflict, since it is played in the unconscious.
Read moreNo author currently appears to be concerned
Indeed, it is surprising to see the very monolithic explanation that most demographers bring to population growth, mainly attributed to the effects of medical and industrial progress. The fact that it grew from 1700, a period of more than a century before these two factors emerged, should have intrigued specialists. It is clear that other factors are involved.
Industrial progress can only change the standard of living once it has entered the bulk of the population. Changes in average living standards were minimal at the beginning of the 18th century. It was during the 19th century that manufactures grew. The Megemont brothers hat factory, for example, had only about thirty workers in 1860. Then, thanks to the rapid development of the railways, it could consider expanding, and employed 300 hatters in 1892.
Read moreNothing guarantees that the ecological disaster can be stopped
The reversibility of a disorder is not a certain thing. The extinction of a species is generally irreversible: dinosaurs, after the impact of the meteorite that fell into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, have definitely disappeared. Crocodiles and turtles are the only reptiles that have survived environmental change, allowing evolution to take a different path, with the supremacy of mammals and most recently that of man.
Damage to the natural environment caused by human activities, although apparently less brutal, may not be reversible either. The hole in the ozone layer seems to be slowly receding since the CFC ban, but a new record occurred over the Arctic, so far relatively spared, in the winter of 2010–2011; It is expected that it will take about 50 years to recover the previous situation, and there is no guarantee that industry will not produce new ozone-depleting substances. Global warming may lead to the dispersion of methane retained under the ocean floor and in permafrost: the greenhouse effect could be affected and the rise in temperatures could lead to the permanent disappearance of many species; We can’t see how the released methane would be trapped again. Many groundwaters used for crops date back to time immemorial and, once exhausted, will not recover.
Read moreOccultation
It is useful, often, to conceal a failure, fear, threat, wickedness, in order to better succeed a delicate action. The sniper, in order to reach his target, has to hide the shock that his weapon or even the homicide that he is committing will send him.
This psychological function allows us to neutralize the obstacles that could make us tremble, close ourselves, abandon the struggle. The child whose mother is a psychopath develops better when he casts the veil on his delusional acts. Similarly, the husband of a neurotic woman often emerges by occulting his wife’s nerve attacks.
Read moreOf man's natural instincts or deviation from his instincts
What is attributed to the unprecedented demographic explosion that we are witnessing powerless?
To the progress of medicine. The draconian drop in infant mortality. Increased life expectancy. Food abundance. In the absence of predators. To the greatest safety, which pushes families to procreate. A desire to live and give life. Inadequate contraceptives. Perhaps at the “Crow and multiply” of Genesis…
These factors certainly play a role. Yet one never thinks of anything of any beast: that the number of births depends directly on how to live sexuality.
Read moreOf which depends our survival
A sort of promethean illusion suggests that man will always manage to survive and find his happiness, regardless of the environmental abuse.
This belief was possible at a time when environmental damage was negligible. But the situation has been particularly aggravated since the Second World War, with the invention of synthetic pesticides, derived from combat gases, and with the mechanization of agriculture. Half a century, and damage to groundwater and humus reserves, global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, biodiversity damage and many other degradations have taken on such a magnitude that ecological balances are seriously compromised.
Read moreOntogenetic paralysis
Definition of ontogenesis:
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In biology: ontogenesis refers to all processes that, in an animal or plant organism, lead from egg cell to breeding adult.
Ontogenesis of behaviors. Development of sensory-motor bonds during body genesis and growth (d-apr. Lar. encyclop. Suppl. 1975)
Shepard borrows this concept from biology to refer here to psychic development. In a more psychoanalytic vocabulary, one should speak of “psychological structuring”, while knowing that the brain bonds between neurons depend on it and make it lasting. By “paralyzing”, it means inhibition of normal psychic development because of the lack of stimuli in the rural context, very poor compared to the world of hunter-gatherers, to which our brain would still be adapted.Other living species
Ecological imbalances arise when some new factors exceed the adaptive capacities of ecosystem actors.
Examples: Most synthetic insecticides exceed the adaptability limits of bees and other pollinators, and have the consequences of serious biodiversity damage. Intensive fishing undermines the reproductive capacity of genetically determined marine species. Our intensive farming methods and our industrial productions generate an incalculable number of similar exceedances which result in the ongoing ecological impasse.
To this evidence, human ecogenetics adds a working hypothesis, “the so-called principle of harmful ecosymmetry”: any human activity that transgresses the limits of adaptability of plants and animals with which humans are in balance (or should be) may also violate their own adaptability limits. In other words: what harms the health of other living species may also harm human health and, vice versa: what harms human health may harm the health of the surrounding species. Each human disease can thus lead to certain behaviour harmful to the environment, and each environmental disorder can refer to a factor likely to be pathogenic to humans.
Read moreOur addiction to consumerism and its contagion force
Consumerism is certainly one of the most important causes of pollution. Packaging, plastics, paper, cartons, dyes, batteries, devices of all kinds, mechanical, electronic, computer, caddies overflowing with products of the food industry that feed our obesitys more than our metabolisms, plus all the energy it takes to make and transport all this fatras, it represents a balance of pollution never equalled, and that can only fly even more with the emergence of developing countries… We tend to buy to buy, to own objects for the pleasure of possessing them, to surround ourselves with all kinds of gadgets quickly fallen into disuse. Manufacturers who flood us with novelty are forced, for reasons of competition, to flood us with advertising. Supposed to inform us. The perverse effect is that in us we set up irrational desires for objects that we could very well do without.
Read moreOur inventions and behavioural changes
Each new invention may result in large-scale behavioural change, and each of these changes may result in new inventions. This is how progress is made, following an unbridled cascade of artifacts and changes in customs and customs. He agreed to rejoice. It is thanks to him that our life today is easier and more interesting, and that growth succeeds in ensuring our safety and standard of living.
However, one may wonder how far this race will go to happiness. A river that descends in cascades, following the line of least resistance as humanity has long seemed to do, always ends in a receiving basin, at the edge of the ocean. And she can’t go any further. She’s losing.
Read moreParanoia
Paranoia is distinguished from neurosis by the alterations of the Self: this one, stuck between imperative requirements of That and inappropriate prohibitions of the Surmoi does not structure properly. There is a cleavage between the image of reality that the paranoid creates to escape his frustrations: he imagines, for example, that it is enough to want something to be realized. He thus exposes himself to continuous disappointments, from which he withdraws a feeling of persecution, one of the most apparent symptoms of this disorder.
Read moreParse
The same effort can be felt either positively or negatively according to the disposition of mind. Digging a hole to look for a treasure doesn’t have the same effect as digging the same hole if you know it’s useless.
It is often enough to say that a job is useless or unjust to find it particularly stressful, while the same work, performed in a good psychological arrangement, because it will bring money or because it is found interesting, seems infinitely less painful. This ambivalence is striking in sport: over-efforts that seem intolerable are felt as a form of achievement if they are provided under the aegis of an Olympic medal.
Read morePerverse effect
The generally unintended and unforeseen negative consequences of any action are called effet-pervers. We can also speak of collateral damage, to repeat the expression inaugurated during the Iraq war.
Most human inventions have effet-pervers, simply because they are by nature outside of existing natural laws and ecological balances. Reciprocity is also true: any environmental degradation results either from a natural accident (eruption, earthquake, meteorite, solar explosion…), or from human action, because man is in principle the only creature capable of new actions contrary to the natural laws that founded ecological balances.
Read morePerversion
It is necessary to distinguish the perversion defined by psychiatry, which is rather the result of perversity, i.e. of a satisfaction to cause others to suffer, and the perversion as understood by psychoanalysis.
For Freud, it is ultimately only the effect of a too weak Surmoi, which lets the subject realize his impulses regardless of the prohibitions imposed by culture. The Self finds it very well, and the only complications that it brings are social. It is difficult to see a relationship between this psychic configuration and hatred or indifference to nature. On the contrary, one could theoretically expect: the rejection of certain social norms that participate in consumerism…
Read morePreventing developing countries from achieving the same benefits
It is a matter of justice and common sense. How can we prevent our less privileged human brothers from benefiting from the same advances as us? We have made every effort to convert them to the benefits of Western culture. They have largely married our values and our form of progress. They are entitled to the same benefits.
We have shamefully exploited them for centuries of colonialism, they are now the ones who colonize us economically, flooding our markets with products defying the laws of competition. To save our industry, we should give up our various levels of pay and protection.
Read morePro-genetic culture
Cultural relativism would like any culture to be good: what matters would not be the characteristics of a given culture, but the fact that individuals appropriate these particularities and find their identity there.
This view, shared by many anthropologists, neglects the genetic determinism of behavior. Our psyche, like that of animals, is governed by a number of innate tendencies, which cannot be rejected with impunity. Attaching a dog permanently to a chain makes it a dangerous animal. Without a regular walk, his aggressiveness exacerbates to the point that he will bite the first come or bark day and night without any other reason.
Read moreProven concept of limited adaptation
Biological systems are capable of “automorphic” and “exomorphic” changes, i.e. operating either on their own biological traits or on their environment, in an attempt to adapt to new conditions. However, the extent and content of the changes that are possible to them remain precisely circumscribed.
Example: a species can adapt to a warming atmosphere of a few degrees. Individuals will use various strategies, such as sweating. In the longer term, the species can adapt by changing its genetic characteristics: elephants have developed the surface of their ears to better refrigerate their blood in contact with the air. However, possible strategies remain limited, none of the existing species could survive temperatures destroying carbon-hydrogen bonds. Most would even succumb to a warming climate of a few dozen degrees. The same applies in all areas of the relationship between living beings and the environment: food, oxygenation, pollution, predation, etc. Life holds only one thread, and this thread is sifting…
Read morePsychic Functions and Dysfunctions
It is essential to distinguish psychological functions and dysfunctions.
The natural functioning of psychism, developed and tested over the course of millions of years, is believed to cause little or no damage to the human organism itself or to the environment on which its survival depends. The damage to human health and the environment that must be clearly seen would then be due to malfunctions, which must be identified and explained.
Read morePsychopathological Factors
We are all convinced that we are perfectly normal. Crazy people are, too.
An astonishment, however, can arise when you learn at school that a certain dose of paranoia and schizophrenia is omnipresent. Psychoanalysis itself considers that normal psychism is available on three axes: neurosis, paranoia and perversion. Adage is well known: the normal is crazy, and the crazy is normal…
It is difficult, within a society whose benchmarks are established by tradition, to determine whether the behaviour considered normal is really normal, i.e. in line with the genetic potential of human beings. The natives accustomed to the ritual of the " plateau niggers" consider the distorted face as a cannon of beauty. Tribes whose women lengthen their necks by stacking rings have other normality criteria. Cultural relativism is a reality in the sense that members of a society who obey certain norms feel these standards as perfectly natural, even if they are clearly unnatural.
Read morePsychophysiological
Psychophysiological disorders include all disorders affecting the functioning of the body and/or psychism. This class of disorders therefore brings together all the pathologies identified by medicine and psychiatry.
The object of human ecogenetics is to seek their causes either in certain inappropriate human behaviors (related to education, social constraints, food, sexuality), or in the influences of the physical environment (urban planning, promiscuity, sedentary life, noise pollution, neurotoxics, etc.) or in the social environment (moral, frustrations, anxiety, education, conflict, materialism, etc.).
Read morePushed our ancestors
What were the psychological characteristics of our ancestors? What has led them to change their relationship to the environment, particularly through agriculture? This is a question whose answers are still in their infancy.
A century ago, men of origin were portrayed as dark brutes, hirsutes, violent, without language, intelligence, love… This image of Epinal has undergone several corrections since then, but little is yet known about these distant forefathers. There are the cave paintings, which are found all over the world, which bear witness to a certain sensitivity, and to an amazing pictorial art, without knowing what their true role was in life then.
Read moreReally reduce nuisances
Between the fine speeches of politicians and the reality of the facts, the gap is great.
About ten years ago, the scarcity of oil and the increase in the price of the barrel had prompted car manufacturers to accelerate the development of electric vehicles. California intended to pioneer the development of the hydrogen industry. Many countries were considering drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What are the concrete results of these beautiful flights?
Read moreReciprocal Links
In an area as complex as the relationship between human behaviour and ecological disorders, it would be simplistic to take into account only the effects of the former on the latter. The behaviour of our ancestors, as well as our modern behaviors, can be influenced in a thousand ways by environmental factors.
In order for a research to be exhaustive, the influences of the environment must count more than the disruptive effects of an urbanised, noisy, polluted, concrete environment, as the traditional ecologists denounce them. Everything that surrounds the individual can have effet-pervers on his or her mental functioning and behaviour: social constraints, anxiety, stress, deprivation, too much ease, excessive idleness such as excessive work, inadequate nutrition, competition, harassment, repressive morality, deficient sexuality, too loose or too severe education, the list is endless.
Read moreRecycling
Recycling reduces both resource demands and the mass of garbage. It is essential to recycle everything that is recyclable in order to curb the unbridled rate of environmental damage. Discharges, incinerators, sewage treatment are essential to curb the ongoing ecological disaster. It is urgent to take all possible measures.
Unfortunately, none of these measures can reduce the various pollution factors to zero. Only part of the plastics can be reused, while the rest continue to accumulate in landfills or pollute the air through incinerators. Incinerators themselves cannot zero the pollutants that they return to air, landfills or compost. Chemical pollutants diffuse into water and air and are not recyclable.
Read moreReducing the standard of living at all costs
The figures are there: there would be room for 700 million Europeans, and we have 7 billion. So everyone should be content with a standard of living which is ten times lower than the average European…
Which European would be ready to do so? What American? Which African or Asian dreaming of Westernization would agree to reduce to the tenth his hopes of happiness? We immediately see that the prospect of such a decline encounters phenomenal resistance.
Read moreRegulatory factors still obscure
Malinowski, the famous ethnologist from the beginning of the past century, was surprised to see the Trobriandese (New Guinea) having only a very reasonable number of children, while they did not know the role of sperm in fertilization and therefore took no precautionary measures.
His astonishment only increased in the course of his investigations, to the point that he ended up rallying to the sayings of these primitive innocents: for them, conception or non-conception was due to magical causes. The rationalism of the ethnologist had to give in to the reality of the facts. Nothing in his knowledge could explain the regulation of births, knowing that coitus were not hindered by any restriction or guilt.
Read moreRenewable energy
Renewable energies are one of the great battle horses of ecology. It is not so much the perforation of the planet as a gruyère that must worry us, but the release of all the carbon that has been trapped for 300 million years, leaving to the atmosphere the equilibrium where life as we know it has developed.
There were times when flying insects were gigantic, simply because oxygen concentration was much higher, and their metabolism could feed their muscles with enough energy. The vital and ecological balance depends much more on the balance of the atmosphere than can be felt, as things are stable over the centuries.
Read moreResource scarcity
A derisory situation is that man, the most advanced of creatures, would find only the destruction of his biotope to curb its proliferation and limit the destruction of its biotope. Sad tautology that the least evolved animals already apply despite them…
It is true that man has no predator. He is therefore forced to make his own predator. By destroying his environment, he would manage to limit the destruction of his environment… Again, ecophilosophy takes a shot!
Read moreRestrictions
It is impossible to limit ourselves beyond certain limits. This is even more true when it comes to large numbers.
This was seen in the Second World War: rationing tickets were badly perceived and resulted in all kinds of pass-rights and a general black market. Yet it is the same kind of measure that awaits the next generations at the point of intersection between the demographic curve and the decline in humus resources following the abuse of intensive agriculture. Apart from other consumption sectors.
Read moreRevolution of thought and action
Human ecogenetics aims to shed light on the psychic dysfunctions that cause the degradation of the planet. It implements an objective analysis of false needs and their origin, based on an evolutionary conception of human nature and ecological balances. This unprecedented synthesis clearly opens the way for a profound revolution of thought and action. The simple ecological morality that rightly gains an ever greater share of the population is probably not enough to change behaviour profoundly. Nor has religious morality really changed sexual behaviour. Sustainable change will only be possible through a detailed awareness of the nuisances of current behaviour and its root causes. This will be easier if false needs are recognized as illusory and inculcated by a civilization contrary to the genetic potential of human beings.
Read moreRevolutionary
**Revolutionary: Why? **
Because human ecogenetics fundamentally questions the functioning of human psychism, and redefines its dysfunctions on new bases as the root causes of ecological debacle.
It is generally considered that man is what he is and that there is no alternative to accepting him as he is. Human ecogenetics blows up these locks and postulates that behaviors that lead humanity to destroy its own biotope, to the point of endangering its future, are likely pathological, even if we feel them as normal.
Read moreRituals and mystical participation
Rituals are usually not directly harmful to the environment.
These include fireworks that leave large volumes of toxic smoke after combustion, farmers’ habit of burning the piles of branches and weeds during the cold season, a theatre that they like to light to brighten up the evening, charcoal barbecues, campfires, cooking food that causes Aboriginal people to desert their land, etc.
Yet in our way of life there are all kinds of rituels that sacralize our allegiance to the system. The Christmas festival, which made the divine child the God of consumerism; the Easter festival, which became the trading fund of pastry confectioners; birthdays with piles of gifts to unpack, early basis of love for unnecessary packaging; the pusher that fits into the baby’s psyche and will serve as the basis for adult love of the car; The requirement of laundry more white than nature that makes the fortune of laundry manufacturers…
Read moreSee tomorrow our planet completely exsangued
We already have a number of foretaste of what could remain green areas of herb, simmering forest, or undulating cereal blondes if the exponential population does not know a rapid point of inflection…
First glance, when we waste kerosene to rise to a few kilometers of altitude in the name of business or tourism: the surface of the ground is cut into small squares, rectangles, triangles and trapezes that make us aware of the exploitation of resources. The landscape is completely fragmented, on gigantic surfaces. Knowing that intensive crops will eventually end with soil erosion, groundwater drying and desertification, we can already get a little idea of the future of the humus.
Read moreSelf-organised systems
Some minds claim new theories on complex systems to sweep away any form of genetic determinism, until they claim that the adaptability of the living would hardly know any limit. Self-organised complex systems would be able to generate new properties and adapt very quickly to new constraints.
Thus, man could invent any fireworks and living organisms would be able to get out without major difficulties. It is of course to forget that any system, as complex as one can imagine, always knows certain limits. The question is therefore basically where these limits are, and whether the artifacts put in place by civilization exceed them or not.
Read moresociological
It has been known since the middle of the last century that the general characteristics of living organisms are recorded as coded gene information. About thirty thousand genes in humans are molecular chains present in cell nuclei and inherited from generation to generation.
This major discovery, now widely confirmed, suggested that the characteristics of organisms were completely predetermined. Epide-la-genetique teaches us today that we need to put this vision of things into perspective, because cells have mechanisms regulating gene expression. Even more recent theories on self-organised systems suggest that other organizing emergences may also be at stake.
Read moreSustainable
It is clear that a solution, in order to be durables, must take into account the factors that led to the problem. Otherwise, the same causes will soon have the same effects, and anything that has been put in place may be pre-empted by forces that have not been suspected of nature.
This is particularly to be feared when it comes to unconscious forces, or mental dysfunctions which are considered normal. It is therefore an essential task of human ecogenetics to redefine a reference to normality – a reference to “naturality” – in order to facilitate the awareness of abnormality – of the unnatural nature – of the needs or behaviours that we find difficult to renounce.
Read moreSustainable co-existence
The bet of human ecogenetics is to define a form of civilization as close to ours as possible, but free of harm to the planetary ecosystem, and respecting natural laws. The road is marked by obstacles, but there is nothing to say that it is impossible.
The first is to highlight the root causes of current drift, most of which are related to human psychism and its dysfunctions. This research is in no way opposed to the efforts made to develop the fireworks on which our society relies, such as the transition from a car with a thermal motor to an electric car, from nuclear or coal plants to renewable energies, from chemical monocultures to organic cultivation, etc. It is urgent to preserve the environment by all means.
Read moreTechnology
Many rely on new technologies to reduce the impact of human activities on the environment.
Solar, wind, geothermal power plants, a fragmentation of the production of homes, electric cars, more sophisticated public transport, ships, even hydrogen planes, more isolated houses, with heating, hot water and solar electricity, less oil-dependants agriculture, locavorism and many other changes in our habits could particularly slow down the deterioration inflicted on the planet.
The question is how much of these depredations are incompressible. Prohibiting consumption to return to the stone age is unthinkable. The best efforts will in any case, in a more or less time, be caught up in the proliferation of consumers.
Read moreThanks to the miracles of new technologies
Any miracle has its limits, at least when it comes to miracles from man’s hand.
Read more
Many questions arise:
– Will the advances of green technologies suffice to compensate for the dramatic increase in humanity’s needs?
– Will these advances be disseminated quickly enough to the world population to prevent the foreseeable and unpredictable effects of current and future overexploitation?
– Will materials resources be sufficient to generalize new technological processes? (e.g. lithium for solar and wind accumulators)
– Will recyclages methods, which are never only partial in application, seriously control the accumulation of waste and polluting materials?
– Will new nuisances, linked to new technologies, although lower than those of current industrial and agricultural methods, really be below the planet’s biocapacity, given the future population growth?
– Will these resources generate sufficient food for future populations, given the erosion of land, water scarcity, risks associated with pesticides and GMOs, limiting sources of fertilizer, etc.?The absence of any predators from the human species
Man is one of the last creatures of evolution. Few predators have had the opportunity to adapt to its characteristics, apart from some parasites such as lice, fleas, intestinal worms, many bacteria, etc.
The black plague, transmitted probably by the fleas of the rats carried by the ships, caused the disappearance of nearly half of the population in Europe in the 14th century. Many other epidemics had already wreaked havoc in ancient times, still in connection with periods of famine weakening people. So it is wrong to say that man has no predator. It can only be said that there is no visible (or macroscopic) predator.
Read moreThe demographic explosion
The figures are eloquent: the world population has grown almost exponentially. Such a curve characterizes a real explosion.
The explosion of a mixture, however, is possible only if the conditions are met for the different ingredients to react. It is therefore a question of inventorying these ingredients, and not forgetting any – a requirement that current demographic research is far from taking on.
Human ecogenetics adds to the demographic factors already taken into account two fundamental issues, which are almost neglected: food, and sexuality. These two areas are closely related to the increase in births and are clearly more important than the reduction in infant mortality and the increase in average life expectancy.
Read moreThe different pages of this site
The site contains a limited number of main pages. This choice is intended to facilitate the first reading. However, all important notions and expressions give access to other pages, comments or definitions, which you can reach by clicking on the highlighted words.
Highlights appear in the text if you pass the cursor over the commented words or passages, then just click to make the comment appear. You can also click on the button at the top of the page to make the highlight appear, and lock them if that is your preference.
Read moreThe Factors of Modernity That Is Cited to Promote Life Expectancy
If the average life expectancy doubles as a result of medical progress and better living conditions, all things being equal, the population also doubles.
Thus, demographers explain population growth during the first phase of demographic transition. When the impact of progress is felt, the population begins to increase as the mortality rate declines rapidly. Then, in a second phase, the birth rate declines in turn as a result of “morrow changes”, so that the population tends to stabilize (see the critique of this model in the following comments).
Read moreThe Galloping Demography
Like a horse that packs up, the world population has been proliferating for centuries (see ) and running to its loss without anyone knowing how to shoot the walrus. Malthus was already expecting exponential growth that, less than two hundred years later, would actually threaten the planet. Naïve, he relied on the common sense of individuals and on a shared desire to limit births. Despite all the contraceptives currently on the market, and despite a slight slowdown in some European countries, the curve continues to fly.
Read more
This explosion is generally attributed to the benefits of industrial progress and medicine: reduced infant mortality, longer lifespan, food abundance, and a sense of security due to political progress. However, according to the estimates of the demographers, it is obvious that the exponential begins much earlier, already in ancient times.The global population growth rate of 1.096%
This figure of 1.096 per cent is derived from the publication of the “a title=“The World Factbook (CIA)” href=“ target=” blank”>CIA “The world factbook” for 2012. It means that every year the world population increases by 1.096 per cent. For a population of 7 billion, the increase is 76,720,000, slightly more than the current population of France.
To realize what this represents, one can visualize a length of one metre, and think that every year one adds a good centimeter. At the end of ten years, it is one meter ten. After a hundred years, she doubled. This if the increase is constant. The demographers give us hope for a reduction in the rate of growth or even a decrease in the population once progress has been made everywhere.
Read moreThe human environment
Definition of Little Robert: the environment includes all natural (physical, chemical, biological) and cultural (sociological) conditions in which living organisms (especially man) develop.
Unfortunately, traditional ecology has little interest in the influences exerted by the material and cultural environment on the psychic state of individuals, as well as those of this psychic state on anti-ecological behaviour and on the future of culture.
Human ecogenetics is intended to fill this gap. Faced with every recognizable mental dysfunction, it takes into account not only genetic determinism – innate tendencies against which there are other remedies than palliatives – but above all environmental determinism, both material and cultural. Each element likely to induce a pathogenic effect at the ecological or health level is subject to thorough examination, as well as the boomerang effects and vicious circles that it may trigger.
Read moreThe immediate consequence of industrial and medical progress
It is clear that a rapid improvement in living conditions can encourage couples to have more children. The bigger salary, the more food, the bigger apartment, the less trouble for the end of the month… If the wish is not deliberate, the attention paid to contraceptives will automatically decline if it is known that an additional child will not cause budget problems.
This reasoning, however, poses a danger: it hides other factors that may influence population regulation. It gives the impression that the problem has turned around, while the fertility rate, i.e. the average number of children per woman, depends on a very large number of factors.
Read moreThe Innate Characteristics of Human Being
Human psychism is partly determined by the genetic data of the species. The common features found in different cultures are the living proof of this. For example: all human beings seek food pleasure, so it can be admitted that this need for pleasure is innate. Similarly, all human beings seek sexual pleasure; It must therefore also be admitted that this need for pleasure is a genetically programmed function, even if the means of realization may differ from one form of society to another.
Read moreThe mechanisms of ecological degradation
Classical ecology already uses biologically decrypting the sometimes very complex mechanisms of different environmental damage. Human ecogenetics proposes to consider these mechanisms in their entirety.
At the origin of biological or biochemical mechanisms are always psychological mechanisms, responsible for inappropriate behaviour. In some cases, these psychological mechanisms are themselves based on biological or biochemical causes. A break between biology and psychology is therefore artificial. It is about preserving the human responsibilities from which harmful behaviour originated.
Read moreThe Medusa Radel
Famous painting if it is, The Radeau de la Méduse today perfectly embodies humanity as a party to drift on the waves of history, illusory hope, loss of landmarks and certain shipwreck. Michelet was the first to put Géricault’s masterpiece in touch with the destiny of our civilization: “It was our entire society that embarked on this raft of the Medusa”…
As artists often do, the painter was able to draw from a topical fact a highly allegorical work: the shipwreck of a raft in which 150 passengers of a stranded ship had taken refuge, leaving in 1816 to colonize Senegal, for lack of sufficient boats. These unfortunate ones eventually fought and devoured the dead, only ten survivors were saved in extremis.
Read moreThe mode of nursing
To entrust their infants to a nurse was already a way for mothers of ancient times to escape the burden of breastfeeding. In the Middle Ages, however, breastfeeding was the rule. It was only from the 16th century that fashion began to flourish. It progressed to culminate in the 19th century and indirectly prolong its effects in the 20th century with infant formulas: many doctors recommended that young mothers give the bottle, considered healthier than the breast thanks to better hygiene conditions.
Read moreThe origin of this false need
It is not enough to denounce false needs to make them disappear. There will always be supporters ready to defend the worst habits in the name of tradition, convenience, individual freedom, and inveterate ecologists tempted to ban to ban. Things change when there are not only objective criteria to distinguish true and false needs, but clear explanations of their respective origins.
Saying, for example, “It’s wrong to smoke because it harms your health” is usually without much effect. Fear of danger is not necessarily dissuasive, as shown by the inefficientness of slogans such as “smoking kills” on cigarette packages. It is much more efficient to explain to smokers the reasons for smoking, and the reasons for it. Once known the psychological causes that prompted the young person to do “like the others” and the biochemical action of nicotine on brain cells, it is much easier to become aware of the meaning of this terrible habit.
Read moreThe population growth in France
Between 1600 and 1700, the population increased from 20 million to 21 million, and in 1801 it reached 29.4 million. Thus, for these two successive centuries, there have been increases of 1 million vs. 8 million respectively, i.e. average relative growth rates per year of 0.5 vs. 3.3. Or about 10500 children more than generational renewal in the 16th century vs. 7000 in the 17th.
A simple exponential increase would have involved increases of 1 million vs. 1.05 million, which would mean supernumerary births from 10500 to only 11025. It is obvious that a major growth factor has occurred in the meantime.
Read moreThe psychic factors
They are indeed psychological factors that make addiction a way of life.
A fundamental question arises in this regard: can artefacts harmful to the environment be indispensable, in terms of survival or happiness, to the human being? We would be in a sort of stalemate of evolution if our basic needs, including that of persevering the species, were in contradiction with the survival of the environment on which our own survival depends. Humanity would by nature be doomed to go towards self-destruction…
Read moreThe requirements of the natural environment
Living organisms all need specific conditions to develop properly. Each species needs a particular food palette, some require a large food range, such as chimpanzees, others rely on a unique food, such as koala, which digests only shoots of certain varieties of eucalyptus. Some organisms can feed on wood, such as larvae of some beetles, while lichens are content with rock.
These specificities depend on the metabolic characteristics of each species, which, like other traits, are mainly determined by de-la-genetique and its long evolutionary past. Each adapted to a certain set of nutrients. It is clear that neither stone nor wood nor even the eucalyptus are foods that meet the requirements of our human assimilation system…
Read moreThe spirits lose their objectivity
An excellent example is that of Jean-Christophe Victor, author of the weekly issue of “em” arte: The Dessous des Cartes. Even though his political performances have always proved to be of a high standard, his entry into the field of eco-demo-futurology ended in a monumental fiasco, to the point that the video published on Youtube was definitely removed by the channel.
It is possible to check in his script, saved by an Internet user, that the commentator commits an incredible error of reasoning, as if at any cost he had to reassure viewers as to the demographic evolution to come, or reassure himself.
Read moreThe unconscious engines
Our conscious motions seem to us to be decisive. We feel that we can freely decide our destiny, our actions, our choices. It takes a real work of inner exploration to see that the unconscious underlies all our psychic activity, and even very widely our free will. It is in these inaccessible areas that the often unfavorable impulses, the roots of greed and selfishness, the anxieties, disgusts, the appetites of all kinds that draw the strings of our conscious life are nested.
Read moreTheoretical and Empirical Research
The human ecogenetics research programme includes an important theoretical component, on the other hand a series of practical experiments.Theoretical research consists in analysing human behaviors related to ecological disorders, whether they are the cause or the consequence, in order to determine to what extent they are natural or paradoxal. The basic assumption is that any natural behaviour is genetically programmed, with a determined adjustment latitude.
Paradoxic behaviour, contrary to human genetic potential, is on the contrary induced either deliberately from the mind (prohibition of satisfying certain basic needs, neurosis due to too repressive morals, obligation to perform rites harmful to health, smoking, trinching etc.), or by external constraints, therefore by the environment which itself has already been modified by human action (impossibility of feeding naturally in a country too cold, repetitive activity empty of meaning imposed by the necessities of employment, need for escape due to urban life, etc.). It is therefore a question of analysing the interactions, the boomerang effects and the vicious circles that have been established in history, for the most part as a result of artifice introduced by man.
Read moreThese artifacts
We are able to invent all kinds of artifacts, but do these artifacts correspond to the innate characteristics of our organisms? There’s no guarantee.
Noah, for example, invented wine; He did not imagine that alcohol consumption would produce thousands of years later a multitude of family dramas and fatal accidents on the roads. In the 16th century, Dr. Nicot imported the tobacco he had discovered among the Indians of America and received a glorious reward from the King of France; Two centuries later, cigarettes were manufactured industrially and were subject to a state monopoly; no one had asked about the body’s ability to cope with smoke, or about psychism in the face of nicotine; The dependence of billions of users has generated countless lung cancers.
Read moreThis hypothesis is materially impossible
There is no doubt that developed countries have seen their rate of population growth decline in recent years. It is therefore our hope that the same process will take place in developing countries. Thus, the world population would eventually stabilize.
This saving reasoning masks a sad reality: the irrefragable fact that the resources available to humanity are limited. The current number of “developed” consumers already exceeds what the biosphere can support. Since the 1980s, we have been living on credit, that is, the global ecological footprint of humanity exceeds the planet’s biocapacity.
Read moreThis is the key to durables reform
All measures to preserve the environment that can be taken are likely to be long-lasting, simply because the galloping population will eventually make them futile.
For example, the pollution generated to date by non-degradable leaching has been produced by some 500 million individuals, mainly from developed countries. Modern, so-called ecological laundry is 95% degradable. We are well aware when we buy them. However, they remain for 5% not degradable. Western habits, however, are widespread throughout the world, under the aegis of globalization. The world population is expected to grow to 12 billion in the coming years. The number of users would therefore be multiplied by 24. Given that 24 X 5 per cent gives 120 per cent, it is clear that measures taken to address this cause of pollution will not prevent a worsening of the situation. This if all housewives started to prefer the fate of the environment over that of their budget, which is certainly due to utopia…
Read moreThought
Why here the word “supposed”?
“supposed” limiting nuisance means exactly “assumed” limiting nuisance. This is the case with modern ecology: we expect to see ways to limit pollution and other environmental damage through alternative technologies that are more nature-friendly. But these technological advances, even if they are necessary in the immediate future, often mask new nuisances that no one has yet thought of or that industrialists are being forced to conceal.
Read moreto a true or false need
How to distinguish a false from a real need?
For some, everything would be determined by culture: our habits and education would generate our needs of civilized men, apart from some purely biological needs.
Human ecogenetics does not exclude the major role of culture in setting up everything we feel like needs. It draws attention to the fact that culture may or may not correspond to the innate potentials inherent in human nature, and that the needs induced by this culture may also be in line with or unrelated to our real nature.
Read moreTo all kinds of deregulations
Psychiatry speaks of mood disorders to characterize “the disruptions of the basic emotional tendency of the mental state that may lead to behavioural changes”. The question is where the boundary between normal and pathological is drawn. This limit is blurred, and some generalised disorders may well go unnoticed due to lack of comparative elements.
Delira is a complete loss of the meaning of reality. It characterizes proven psychopathotic disorders, such as delusional puffs, paranoid delirium, or schizophrenia. The subject can no longer properly control his words and actions, he does not realize the effect he does to others, does not see differences of conduct, puts himself in danger, can have hallucinations, etc. These states are not difficult to recognize.
Read moreToday it would take ten times the planet
Calculation is difficult. Of course, we can only give orders of magnitude. Starting from the figures of the QUID 2001, that is, once the planet for 700 million inhabitants at the European standings, we actually arrive at 10 planets for the 7 billion humans that currently inhabit the globe.
Other estimates are less pessimistic, <a title=“Ecological impression of humanity” href=“
It is also necessary to take into account the rapid increase in the world’s population, which could largely compensate for environmental efforts. The contribution of poor countries will be particularly heavy: to disproportionate fertility rates (up to 7 children per woman!) will add the decrease in infant mortality and the increase in life expectancy. We are far from stabilizing the population expected by the most optimistic demographers.
Read moreToday vital
Unfortunately, it is not an exaggeration to regard the ecological problem as vital. Global warming, droughts, the impoverishment of humus land and the plankton oceans, chemical pollution, the demographic explosion, the globalization of consumerism, all this can only end in disaster if we do not give a masterful brake. Let us hope that human ecogenetics will contribute. It is for the moment the only step that goes back to the root causes of the impasse, passing on to the grill the very functioning of human psychism, and especially its possible dysfunctions.
Read moreTools, techniques and weapons
It is one of the great prides of man to have invented the tool. Ethologists have certainly shown that the most advanced primates already use some of them, for example well-chosen pebbles to break pruned nuts or stems of wood to fish termites. Paradoxically, the achievements of which one can be most proud as technologie pass towers, such as bulldozers, tankers, offshore stations, nuclear power plants, represent ecological, real or potential disasters. Even more common utensils such as refrigerators, appliances, electronics, packaging, are not without serious consequences for the environment. Rather, this pride should give way to some mistrust.
Read moreTraditional ecology has little interest in psychological factors, see psychopathological
It is not by chance that human psychic functioning is not fundamentally called into question. There are some environmentalists who attribute consumerist drift to greed or selfishness. But these defects are then considered unfortunate aspects of human nature.
Human ecogenetics is taking one more step, not only by seeking more systematically the psychological tendencies generating environmental destructive behaviour, but by focusing its research on the root causes of these trends.
Read moreTwo inescapable facts
It is surprising that there are few cases in environmental circles of population growth and the race for progress in developing countries. However, these are the main challenges for future disaster prevention.
Everyone knows that the world’s population has already far exceeded the limits of global biocapacity (for thirty years!). It would take not only a massive economic decline, and therefore a drastic renunciation of the benefits of progress in all the countries of the world, to restore a semblance of equilibrium, but even more a drastic slowdown in the rate of births if the longer-term impasse is to be avoided.
Read moreUnforeseen Feedback
When there is a balance between several elements, acting on one element automatically leads to reactions of the other elements in equilibrium, which run counter to the desired effect.
Example: An insecticide is spread to eradicate mosquitoes in a city. The decrease in the number of mosquitoes leads to the weakening of their predators, which can no longer reproduce. The scarcity of predators makes the remaining mosquitoes much easier to reproduce. The final result is that mosquitoes have paradoxically multiplied as a result of insecticide. If the operation is repeated, they eventually adapt to it, the product becomes inefficient, and the birds become intoxicated.
Read moreViolent circles
A vicious circle is always due to interactions between two or more factors that reinforce each other. They appear almost systematically when man violates natural laws by exceeding the limits of resilience of the environment.
The ecological balance of the natural environment is the result of an evolution which, for millions or billions of years, has guaranteed a constant improvement and an extraordinary complexity of the vital mechanisms belonging to the different species. These mechanisms are interdependants, as the evolution of a particular mechanism has been made according to others and has also determined the evolution of others. We’re talking about co-evolution.
Read moreWatt did not invent his steam machine
The idea of using steam to obtain a mechanical effect dates back to ancient times. In the first century B.C.E., Heron d-Alexandria was building a small steam engine, operating on the principle of jet engines. A first steamboat was presented to Charles Quint by a Spanish inventor navigator in 1543, but the adventure did not proceed and there was no record of the mechanical principles used.
It was only in 1781 that James Watt designed a system to obtain a circular movement and rotate an axis, a sine qua non condition for industrial use. Then, in 1803, the first condensing cylinders and high-pressure boilers appeared allowing the application to mobile vehicles.
Read moreWe vivons-a-credit
Living on credit when it comes to finance is risking bankruptcy. We can recover from bankruptcy. When it comes to ecological balances, the chances of restoring health are slim…
Yet humanity has lived on credit for thirty years, taking more than it can give or renew. And these are not figures made by illuminated ecologists, but figures that are still too optimistic. This has been demonstrated by the more recent corrective studies, provided in particular by the very serious Swiss Offices for the Environment, Territorial Development and Cooperation. The first calculations had omitted some pollutant impacts, the need to preserve untapped spaces, the crucial problem of water management, etc.
Read moreWhat we know today about de-la-genetique, ecology and psychology
These disciplines have made tremendous progress in the last century.
It is now well known that biological and psychic functions are largely determined by the genome. It is no longer possible to reason without taking these data into account when interested in the human condition. Man is not only what culture makes of him, a whole innate basis determines the broad lines of his behavior. Its basic needs, its ability to act and adapt are governed by certain rules that cannot be violated without paying the price.
Read moreWhere civilization thought it could cut itself off from natural habitat
This is how Shepard describes the decline of agricultural civilizations. A sad fate that might well be ours if we don’t quickly change course:
The cycle typically began with the concentration of authority and organization manifested through war expansion, territoriality and the establishment of irrigation systems and water reserves. The productive soil surface was increased by carefully managed water distribution. Irrigation gradually replaced complex and highly branched hydraulic systems. When the population grew beyond the available resources, the migrants moved to the heights, along the steps of coalminers and loggers, and settled, for the most part, as breeders in the valleys along the tributaries of the great rivers, such as the Tiger and Euphrates. Over the years, their herds grew, trampled and undisturbed the mountain slopes, destroying their vegetation and eroded the soil. The land lost its water retention capacity, which increased the leaching after the rains and lowered the groundwater supply to sources and wells. The seasonal variation in water resources was exacerbated by this succession of floods and shortages. The silt threatened to congest water retention and the kilometres of sophisticated water duct systems on which agriculture depended.
Read moreWill
One can distinguish in the will a “primary will” which exceeds the individual himself from the fact that it emerges from unconscious contents, and a “voluntary will” taken over from the previous one by the mind or generated by elements contrary to nature.
The deliberate will can either oppose natural laws or respect them. It can oppose the primary will, resulting in internal conflicts. The will actually intervenes in the continuation of the urge and desire. The primary will is the realization force associated with the impulse, it corresponds to the natural potential of the human being. While deliberate or secondary will tends to realize desire and knows the same hazards. It can be influenced by culture, either through the deformations of desire, or directly by thought patterns, anxieties or other repressed contents.
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