Introduction The Fundamental Debate: Michel Serres the Ecocritic vs. Luc Ferry the Ecoskeptic

The current ecological debate in France may be summarized by the contrast between philosophers Michel Serres and Luc Ferry. Serres condemns the war on nature that modern humans, desiring in the Cartesian tradition to “master and possess” nature, seem to be waging. He aspires to a “natural contract” between humans and nature, which would entail a symbiotic relationship between the parties. Ferry accuses Serres of being antihumanist—a radical, deep ecologist—and mocks the very idea of a natural contract. While Serres’s world view is ecocentric, placing humans on the same plane as the rest of nature, which should possess legal dignity, Ferry embraces an anthropocentric world view, in which humans are clearly separate from and superior to the rest of nature. Bruno Latour, a student of Serres, accuses Ferry of being mired in Kantian modernism.

Time, Weather, and Waste: Michel Tournier’s Gemini (Les Météores)

Gemini is the most geographical or spatial of Tournier’s novels. Natural occurrences like weather and tides, and spaces shaped by humans, like gardens and landfills, are key “characters” in the novel. Tides illustrate the double meaning of temps (time and weather), and the intertidal creatures that suffer through low tide are a metaphor for all marginals, especially the disabled and homosexual characters of Gemini. Gardens prove the intimate bond between humans and humus, from the lush gardens of Tunisia to the geothermal gardens of Iceland, to the tiny perfection of the Japanese miniature garden. Finally, towering landfills, alive with rats and gulls, present an infernal mirror of our consumer society, a malignant inversion of homo economicus into homo detritus.

Ethical Humanism and the Animal Question: Vercors’s You Shall Know Them (Les Animaux dénaturés)

Vercors’s You Shall Know Them, published shortly after WWII, grapples with the question of how to define humans and how to differentiate them from animals. This “animal question” is closely linked to the “law of the strongest” and a long history of racism, imperialism, and capitalism, as exposed in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Archeologists, looking for fossils, discover a tribe of intelligent ape-like hominids in New Guinea, and no one can determine if they are human or another species of great apes. A businessman wants to castrate most males, intern them in camps, and use them as cheap labor in his wool mills, an ominous reference to the Nazi concentration camps that had so recently shaken Vercors’s humanist convictions, laying bare the bestiality of humans. After a long trial, it is decided that the hominids should be considered human, because, worshipping fire, they manifest a spirit of religion. Like Camus’s “Human Crisis” lecture of 1946, You Shall Know Them is a call for the restoration of human dignity, annihilated by the savagery of the war.

Deep Ecology Gone Wrong: J.-C. Rufin’s Globalia and Le Parfum d’Adam

In Globalia and Le Parfum d’Adam J.-C. Rufin explores what could go wrong with the environmentalist movement, if it were co-opted by unwise or greedy leaders. Globalia is the sole country in a dystopian world governed according to the principles of deep ecology: vegetarianism, strict protection of forests and animals, and zero population growth. It is a sterile, climate-controlled world, covered by domes. “Non-zones” outside the domes are homes to mobsters, warring tribes, and resistants. They constitute a feared outside enemy which serves to unite most Globalians in support of their totalitarian government. This novel echoes Alexis de Tocqueville’s fear that a “tyranny of the majority” might someday rule the United States. Le Parfum d’Adam is a thriller about ecoterrorists who, obsessed by the deep ecology principle that world population must decrease, plot to contaminate the water system of a huge favela of Rio de Janeiro. They believe that poor people—too busy surviving to think about ecology—are destroying the planet.

A Fairy in the Age of Prometheus: Chantal Chawaf’s Mélusine des détritus

Melusine is a fairy of French folklore, originating in the Poitou region of western France. She was cursed to metamorphose into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday, but in general is a positive figure, associated with fresh water and forests, the construction of castles and churches, fertility and maternity. Mélusine des détritus is a depressing new take on the fairy story. The Melusine of Chawaf’s novel is a young woman who suffers acutely from the contemporary industrial world in which she lives. She has developed severe asthma from breathing polluted air, she lives in the fear of a meltdown destroying the nuclear power plant near her town and has a vague fear that the human race as we know it will not survive much longer. She symbolizes the disenchantment of the modern world recounted by such contemporary French philosophers as Michel Maffesoli and Pierre Rabhi.

From Ecohumor to Ecohumanism: Iegor Gran’s O.N.G! and L’Ecologie en bas de chez moi

Iegor Gran’s two humorous novels poke fun at the self-righteousness, opportunism, anti-humanism, catastrophism, and humorlessness of some environmentalists. More an ecoheretic than an ecosceptic, Gran provides a Rabelaisian and Voltairean critique of environmentalists who take themselves too seriously. O.N.G! recounts a ridiculous war between two NGOs forced to share office space. Despite their lofty ideals, everyday life proves too difficult to manage, and their relationship degenerates into a bloody war over such trifles as parking and bulletin board space. L’Écologie en bas de chez moi is above all a critique of Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s 2009 environmental film Home, which Gran denounces as paternalistic and opportunistic, comparing it unfavorably to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a documentary about Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg Rally. Both are propaganda films featuring aerial photography and stirring music, but Gran finds Riefenstahl much more creative.

Environmentalism is a Humanism

Ecocritics have long been at odds against humanism. What is needed is an “ecological” or “inclusive” humanism, which includes humans and nonhumans, rather than regarding humans as the crown of creation. Several contemporary French intellectuals affirm that one cannot be an ecologist without being a humanist. Claude Lévi-Strauss disparages traditional Western humanism, which denies dignity not only to nonhumans, but to non-Western humans. Pierre Rabhi calls for a “universal” and “true” humanism that respects the earth. Edgar Morin writes that “spaceship Earth” has no pilot: humans must be “ecologized” in order to save the planet. Michel Maffesoli’s “ecosophy” is a plea for Dionysian “progressivism” to replace Promethean “progressism.” His humanism—etymologically linked to “humus” and “humility”—entails a deep respect for the earth. Finally, the American Thomas Berry rejects traditional Christian humanism in favor of an ecological humanism that embraces an “interdependent biological community of the human with the natural world.”

Marginality and Animality: Olivia Rosenthal’s Que font les rennes après Noël?

Que font les rennes après Noël? is narrated in alternating paragraphs by a female second-person narrator (vous) and several male first-person narrators (je). The woman recounts her life from a child up to the age of forty-four. She has always loved animals and is haunted by the question of what reindeer do after Christmas. Overprotected by her parents, the narrator is a Jew in Catholic France who has long suppressed her homosexuality, and thus has always felt like a misfit. The male narrators—a veterinarian, a zookeeper, a laboratory researcher, a butcher, a wolf trainer, and a stock farmer—all work with animals. The protagonist gradually learns about the horrible suffering humans cause animals and comes to identify more with them than with other humans. Rosenthal hints at the connection—expressed by Jacques Derrida, Élisabeth de Fontenay and especially Charles Patterson in Eternal Treblinka—between the human tragedy of the Holocaust and the animal tragedy of the abattoir.

Cloud Erotica: Stéphane Audeguy’s The Theory of Clouds (La Théorie des nuages)

Audeguy’s Theory of Clouds reaches far beyond the cirrus, cumulus, stratus, and nimbus forms we know. The Krakatoa volcano was “the largest cloud ever recorded,” a natural bomb that was duplicated decades later by the grotesque mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, and the ashes rising from the chimneys of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Humans have allowed themselves to be “denatured,” destroying themselves and the world in the process. There is an intimate relationship between the microcosm of the human body and the macrocosm of nature, neither of which we can fully understand: a “confrontation between the limitlessness of desire and the unthinkable infinity of nature” (Audeguy, Opera mundi 39). Audeguy’s protagonist Abercrombie is a true “erotologist,” obsessed by the mysterious connection between female bodies (microcosm) and clouds (macrocosm).