Lévi-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. »
While the international community was preparing to negotiate in Copenhagen the conditions for durables development, Claude Lévi-Strauss was extinguishing, leaving behind – in addition to the foundations of structuralism and an inescapable intellectual heritage – the basis for avant-garde environmentalist thinking.
As early as the 1970s, the ethnologist and philosopher, a confessed pessimist, expressed concern about the future of humanity. A planet whose limits he was pressing, an Earth “which is not indefinitely extensible” and whose exhaustion he predicted if humanity “be allowed to go at this rate, to this proliferation”.
" Civilization is no longer this fragile flower that was preserved in some sheltered corners of a terroir rich in rustic species. Humanity settles in monoculture; It’s about to produce mass civilization like beet", we read in “Tropical Trists”.
Among the last words he said: “What I see is the present ravages; is the frightening disappearance of living species, whether plant or animal; and because of its present density, the human species lives under some sort of internal poisoning regime — if I may say so — and I think of the present and the world in which I am finishing my existence. It’s not a world I love.”
No one can love a world that runs for collective suicide. The worst is the feeling of impotence that everyone feels as a Levi-Strauss could feel himself. Nobody knows what to do and everyone is waiting for a solution to fall from heaven.
Human ecogenetics proposes to question the psychological and psychopathological causes of the current impasse of civilization. Does the form that progress has taken and that the West is in the process of inoculating to all the peoples of the world stem from the natural functioning of human psychism, or from certain dysfunctions whose science has not yet pierced mysteries?
In particular: is the demographic explosion that threatens the planet inevitably linked to the instinct of natural reproduction, innate in humans as in other living species? Or would it be the result of certain deviations that would have interfered with the sexual system set up by civilization?
The question seems unlikely, but it is often beyond the most shared beliefs and stereotypes that solutions are hidden…
Source: