Wake up you ecomoderns, we are in the Anthropocene, not in the Holocene, nor are we to ever reside in the enchanted dream of futurism. Down to earth is the message I hear, but unfortunately not in the ecomodernist manifesto.

There is one thing more difficult than to tell good from evil, it is to decide which time we are in, which epoch, and which land we have our feet on. I was reminded of that difficulty Saturday at the border when the police officer, after having asked me what research I was doing, and on learning that I work on environment with a special interest in the drought, retorted:  “Drought, which drought? Have you not read the Bible, it is all there, 7 years dry, 7 years wet. I have been in California for forty years, it’s always like this, it never fails. So don’t believe environmentalists, there is no drought”, and then he vigorously stamped my passport. Same thing here, which time and space are we in?

From my first reading of the Breakthrough book, I got extremely interested in what its two authors were up to. I wrote a long and favourable review out of which they extracted a piece which they titled ”love your monsters” for what was going to be the Breakthrough Journal. I had compared the reactions of many people, from the left as well as from the right, to our present ecological predicaments, to the famous scene in Mary Shelley’s novel titled, I remind you,Frankenstein or the New Prometheus, where Dr Frankenstein flees in horror at the sight of the nameless creature he has manufactured from bits and pieces.

As you know, if the creature became wicked, it is because it had been abandoned by its maker. The total hypocrisy of Dr Frankenstein’s fleeing the creature instead of coming back and nurturing it to make it socially acceptable to its fellow organisms, is where Shelley’s story departs from the biblical account: as I said in the essay, God the Creator did not abandon His creature in spite of his sin, and sent back his Son to redeem it once again. So when Dr Frankenstein, at the end of the novel, screams in repentance ”I will never again be an apprentice sorcerer” or something to that effect, he asked to be forgiven for a crime that hides his real sin: namely to have abandoned his creature.

If I remind you of this piece and of this story, it is first to say that even though I am here an example of Old Europe, I share none of the attitudes that seem to be the butt of most attacks in this assembly: I have always been post environmentalist, I never believed in wilderness – how could I, coming from a countryside in Burgundy that is so old and so artificial that it was already ancient at the time of Roman invasion of Gaul? Also, I don’t believe in the harmony of nature and I am probably the only intellectual to have written a book with the subtitle ”the love of technology”. But if I cite this tale, it is also because I am not so sure that the ”love your monsters” argument has been fully understood, nor that the biblical dimension has been fully grasped. I don’t think we want to behave like Dr Frankenstein and confess a small sin we did not commit, in order to hide a much bigger, much more mortal one.

And this is where we encounter this strange animal, rather this monster, “ecomodernism”, that I am not sure we should learn to love, and that triggers in me, I have to confess, a deep antipathy. To me, it sounds much like the news that an electronic cigarette is going to save a chain smoker from addiction. A great technical fix which will allow the addicted to behave just as before, except now he or she will go on with the benefit of high tech product and the happy support of his or her physician, mother and significant other. In other words, ”ecomodernism” seems to me another version of “having one’s cake and eating it too”.

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But then you have to answer this simple question: how do you invent the political constitution that is able to absorb the Anthropocene, namely the reaction of the earth system to our action, in a way that renders politics again comprehensible to those who are simultaneously actor, victim, accomplices and responsible for such a situation?

You may decide that this is not your project, but then why on earth write a manifesto? There is an immense danger in hiding from view that we are at war, in a state of war, just as in the 17th century when Hobbes invented the Leviathan to get out of what he called the state of nature. Except now the situation is reversed. We used to be in the State of Nature, capital S capital N, and we tried to avoid the war of all against all. But now the game is immensely more complicated because there are many other agencies that make a claim for power sharing. Agencies are everywhere entangled, and we don’t have a political institution at the scale of the phenomena.

If I decide in the end to be an ally of your political movement, I will easily forgive the label you choose and the flag you selected. But I will be convinced only when I have obtained a detailed list of your friends and your enemies. And please don’t tell me that you have no enemies, and that it is all about tracing the obvious and inevitable path of reason and progress — because I know who has drawn that path. It is a providential God, which is not my God.

As usual, those who fight against apocalyptic talk and catastrophism are the ones who are so far beyond doomsday that they seriously believe that nothing will happen to them and that they may continue forever, just as before. This is what makes Pope Francis’s Laudatio Si! so refreshing by comparison: it does take seriously what it means to live “at the end of time”, and in its redistribution of agency, it does add ‘our Sister, Mother Earth’.