About | Another Life

Why “Another Life”?

Because we have a problem. By “we,” I mean most living beings now located on this tiny oasis floating in the middle of the cold immensity of space. The root of the issue is a certain species, known to scientists as Homo sapiens sapiens.

To be more precise, we have a number of problems.

The Anthropocene is officially upon us. Its main impacts include:

• A mass extinction event. The earth has lost 50% of its wildlife since the 1970s, and is on track to lose up to 67% of all vertebrates by 2020. While this is cause enough for concern, humanists should also remember that given how interconnected all ecosystems are, this ecological crash could snowball to the point of also threatening the survival of the human species itself. See here for further discussion.

• Human-induced climate change, which not only severely contributes to the mass extinction of species, but is also severely disrupting the natural systems supporting the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of humans—due to an increase of draughts, floods, extreme weather events, pest invasions, etc. Concretely, this is translated as decreasing food production and freshwater supplies. In the long run, sea level rise will most probably lead to the disappearance of entire countries and the flooding of densely populated areas, thus provoking mass migration movements and increased social unrest worldwide. From the standpoint of basic human justice, climate change has been overwhelmingly caused by the inhabitants of developed countries, but it will hit hardest the people who have contributed least to it around the world.

• Catastrophic loss of topsoil worldwide, due to destructive agricultural processes. We might only have 60 years of harvests left globally if soil degradation continues.

These issues are caused or compounded by interlocking social, political and economic systems, which are notably characterized by:

• The dependence of modern societies on continuous economic growth, which requires the consumption of ever-increasing quantities of natural resources and energy, and therefore ecological damage. When economic growth stops, society is thrown into chaos. We don’t know (yet?) how to make our current economic systems work without growth. But these systems feed on the finite resources of our planet.

• An extreme reliance on the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, which besides being the primary causes of human-induced climate change, are also causes of widespread local pollution, loss of biodiversity, and economic exploitation. This dependence also results in the major influence of the fossil fuel industry in political processes—once again hampering a transition to cleaner and fairer ways of life.

• Huge wealth inequality in the world, leading to the concentration of power into the hands of the super-rich and big business—who overwhelmingly evade taxation, and thus contribute little to the global good.

• The widespread dominance of the neoliberal mindset since the 1980s. On a political level, this ideology drives ever more wealth and power into the hands of a global elite, at the expense of social safety nets; and through the investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms embedded in free trade treaties, among other means, it further undermines democratic governance. Economically, neoliberalism (financial capitalism) increases instability, by hampering checks and balances mechanisms, bringing about economic upheavals repeatedly. On a psychological level, it promotes a vision of the human being as a discrete unit in perpetual competition with everyone else, thus creating atomized societies afflicted by apathy, depression and loneliness.

• A growing democratic deficit in a number of countries, often as a result of the aforementioned factors. This leads to feelings of powerlessness and resentment on behalf of ordinary people, and paves the way for the rise of authoritarian regimes.

This blog exists as a pretext for me to think more constructively about these delightful topics, and thereby clarify the way in which I could get personally involved in making things (at least a little) better. For now, I will mostly focus on presenting the contents of certain books and articles I have been reading that touch upon these issues—mostly as a kind of verbose memo to myself; but if anyone is interested, all the better. Some of these reviews will be in French.

All thoughtful feedback is welcome.

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/!\ Spoiler alert /!\

Some books likely to be reviewed at some point:

• Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, by George Marshall, 2014

• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, 2014

• Extinction: A Radical History, by Ashley Dawson, 2016

• The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, 2007

• The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century, by Carne Ross, 2012

• The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, by Mark Boyle, 2010

• Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, by Mark Boyle, 2015

• Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination, by David Graeber, 2011