Technology

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.

We always fall back on the determining variable: population growth. Whatever technological progress, rationing measures, recyclages and other efforts could theoretically be put in place, one day will come when the product of the minimum ecological footprint of the individual, multiplied by the number of individuals, will exceed the biocapacity of the planet.

The most basic common sense is that one acts on both variables. And we will never act in depth on the demographic variable without putting in the collimator what Michel Foucault called the “sexuality device”…