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Setting limits to how we use the earth's resources will not lead to deprivation, but will actually enrich all humanity and all creation
By Isabelle de Gaulmyn |
What are the limits to our planet?
At the dawn of the third millennium, we feel the need - at least as the Climate Convention argued - to formally enshrine "global limits" in our laws.
But there was a time when the expression was an oxymoron, so much so that the adjective planetary meant infinite.
This reversal should make us smile when we consider that for at least two centuries we have been lulled by the certainty that progress is precisely the art of surpassing our limits. It is even one of modernity's fiercest criticisms of religion, that it places constraints on humankind that threaten our sacrosanct freedom.
Our society, which made the slogan "no limits" its compass, now demands limits. And - to top it all off! - even wishes to carve them into the marble of our Constitution.
But this is not something that's entirely new. Already in the 1970s, the Club of Rome published the so-called Meadows Report titled, "The Limits to Growth".
But that was a question of individual resources, oil in particular, which we had to avoid depleting.
The idea of "planetary limits" was defined for the first time in 2009 by a team of Australian researchers. The perspective is quite different: we are not talking about a few resources, but about the Earth as a system that embodies a set of parameters that must not be destabilized beyond certain limits.
For us who thought we were superhumans, ecology has the merit of reminding us that we cannot live without limits.
"It is an eternal experience that every man who holds some power is inclined to abuse it. He carries it to the point at which he finds limits," said the 18th century French philosopher Montesquieu.
These limits must be set transparently and collectively, with the awareness that this is a scientific construction, not an absolute truth.
Therefore, these "planetary limits" cannot be understood as a threat or a punishment that the living would give to a faulty humanity: a kind of border beyond which we would fall into nothingness or be doomed to hell.
Yet some apocalyptic ecology advocates draw a terrorizing perspective, like another form of religion, made up of fear and mortification, which lends itself to accusations of "green fundamentalism".
This would be a terrible misinterpretation, because limits are the exact opposite of deprivation: it is the unlimited that leads to the absence of meaning.
Limits, on the other hand, allow room for the other: for the one who lives next door, for the one who comes after us, for future generations, as well as for that which is different, the unexplored part of the world and life in all its diversity.
People are relational beings, and relationships require dialogue and otherness.
In this context, setting limits together is not an escape from the end of the world, but a way of enriching ourselves, of giving meaning to what we do and to our way of inhabiting the planet... with or without God!
Isabelle de Gaulmyn is a senior editor at La Croix and a former Vatican correspondent.
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