Future of Mobility #28: Some Thoughts around Planetary Boundaries and Oceanic Feeling.

Everything seems to happen as if the owl of Minerva, the symbol of wisdom, had vanished far away from our turpitudes. This bird of the night might have found haven in the admirable thoughts of great poets, just like this one from Rabindranath Tagore: “When I was eighteen, a sudden spring breeze of religious experience for the first time came to my life. One day while I stood watching at early dawn the sun sending out its rays from behind the trees, I suddenly felt as if the morning light on the face of the world revealed an inner radiance of joy.” This wonderful confession brought me back to my younger days. I was around the same age as Tagore when I was swamped by a similar overwhelming perception. It was a summer sundown and I was leaning on the fence of a balcony, looking at the forest in front of me. I don’t know if it came from my enchantment at the view of the beautiful landscape, the exhilarating floral fragrances or the relative alleviation in my mind, the fact is that, for a moment, I was immersed in a great fullness and a feeling of intense unity with the surrounding nature. This emotion was so impactful that it touched me deeply and created a lasting memory since then.

I discovered this citation from Tagore in the latest and fascinating opus from the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History in a Planetary Age”. To my surprise, Chakrabarty makes a strong connection between our global climate crisis and the intimate fervor of the poet. He perceives some rays of hope conveyed by this personal emotion with the possibility to overcome our existential threat. The professor delivers an impressive thesis about the need for humans to reconnect with nature and all the other forms of existence on the planet, natural reproductive lives and non-living things. From his point of view, we are in a general political impasse that can only be broken by our individual re-enchantment to the world, the fundamental need to retrieve our sense of wonderment and reverence for the planet.

Over the last few hundred years, we learned not to be frightened by the earth, we were taught that she was created just for the benefit of humans, that we could dominate her and abuse all living beings and resources as we wish. We used to believe that our planet was given to humans, that she would remain stable forever. In my childhood, I had no doubt that all the mountains, the glaciers, the oceans, the rivers or the forests would stand forever, that they would remain pristine and untouched for future generations, I was insouciant, basking in the “certainty-of-the-world”.

Unfortunately, the situation has dramatically deteriorated over the last few decades. To emphasize the solemnity of our times, Chakrabarty uses a striking image: we are becoming as vulnerable as our primitive ancestors who witnessed helplessly the convulsive movements of Earth. Despite all the recent disasters, we still hardly accept the fact that we are entering in a traumatic period where “the narrative of our world history has collided with the much longer-term geological history of the planet.”

We tend to forget that life is a miracle. We would like to continue playing like innocent children with the elements as if they were just toys in our kindergarten. This is over. We must engage ourselves in the complexity of our planet, dive into the deep time of the history of Earth, recognize our humility over her intermeshed and auto-amplifying processes and act with care.

Throughout this article, I will combine Chakrabarty’s views with the voices of Carl Sagan, Amitav Ghosh, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and I will call on some thinkers who proposed the poetic name of “oceanic feeling” to express their indissoluble bond to nature, like an echo to Rabindranath Tagore’s experience.

 1.     The Geological Time

The advent of complex life on our planet was not inevitable. It was a pure marvel. I had this statement in my mind all through my reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book. For this reason, before going further, I want to step back and review a few key events from our Earth’s history. I reproduced below the geological time scale from Harvard X adding below some additional information I collected through a few other sources.

Here are a few key takeaways. When the planet was created, there was no oxygen. It took hundreds of millions of years for the Earth system to develop a delicate atmosphere that would enable the flourishing of complex life, animals and plants. Life did not happen on the planet thanks to oxygen, it is the other way around. The oxygenation came from life itself: some microorganisms in the ocean called cyanobacteria spontaneously began to produce oxygen through photosynthesis. This is one of the mysteries of the origin of complex life on Earth. Several hundred years later, these cyanobacteria produced enough oxygen to start the oxygenation of the Earth’s atmosphere. The rising of the oxygen in the atmosphere took a very long time and we had to wait until 350 million years ago to reach the same level of oxygenation that we have today (around 20%). Another interesting recent discovery is related to an age between 715 and 660 million years ago during which the planet became entirely frozen with at least two periods of glaciation. Scientists called this period the “Snowball Earth episode” and consider that it could be at the origin of the development of more complex organisms. The expansion of a diversified life happened during the well designated “Cambrian explosion”, between 550 and 500 million years ago.

Afterwards, the earth suffered five mass extinctions. The timescale below shows the occurrence of these dramatic events for our biosphere. I used the information from “Our World in Data” and did some fine-tuning on the format to highlight the causes of extinction for each catastrophe.

It seems that volcanic activity is responsible for the majority of the mass extinctions, even the famous asteroid which killed our legendary dinosaurs was pre-dated with intense tectonic movements from the Earth. I was intrigued by the scientific definition of mass extinction: it corresponds to the loss of at least 75% of the species within a short period, which means in a geological viewpoint around 2 million years! Meanwhile, a statement provided by the “Living Planet Report 2022” estimates a decline of 69% in species populations in the last fifty years… Does this mean that our civilization has such a disastrous impact that we could wipe out life on Earth thousands time faster than the geological elements themselves? To qualify the terrible impact of our civilization footprint on biodiversity, Chakrabarty mentions a sad quote from Edward O. Wilson who stated that “humanity has so far played the role of planetary killer, concerned only with its own short-term survival. We have cut much of the heart out of biodiversity.” (from his book “The Future of Life”).

In fact, when we look at the geological time scale, we could have the wrong understanding that our humanity is too negligeable to influence the tremendous forces inherent to the planet. It was hard to believe for me, but we have become an extremely powerful catalyzer of dramatic transformations on Earth, a species that is now considered as a “geological agent point”. I think we can say that the damage that we are applying to biodiversity in such a short time has never been suffered at this scale by Earth since her creation. Our blindness to this tragic situation is commented by the biologist David Reznick: “The reason why we do not sense cataclysm, even though the geological record is certain to preserve it this way, is because of the difference in the time frame of our lives versus the time frame of the geological record. To us, 100 years is a long time. In the fossil record, 100,000 or even a million years can appear as an instant.”

2.     The Human Time

After hundreds of millions of years of endless variations, the climate on our planet eventually calmed down in the latest period. I reproduced below two models (among several others) that show the historical evolution of the temperatures on Earth, from the Cambrian for the first one and from the Cretaceous for the second one. The Earth system has suffered many perturbations in its history, but when we look at the trend over the last ten thousand years, it is fascinating to see that it is quite flat, which corresponds to the period called Holocene.

One of the most astonishing geological events is that our current living conditions are based on this fragile equilibrium which stabilized the temperature of Earth at an ideal level for humanity to allow its expansion. This is another prodigy praised by Chakrabarty. If we go a little further back to the last 3 million years, around the time of the birth of archaic humans (Homo Habilis), it is noticeable that the temperature has never been above the +2-degree Celsius threshold, navigating between +2 and -4 degrees. This is the reason why the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement is to hold the increase in global average temperature well below +2 degrees above pre-industrial levels to remain in a climate range that it viable for humans.

As a matter of fact, the development of agriculture happened independently during these early times of the Holocene in six different regions of the world. Scientists use this proof to demonstrate that our ability for farming and breeding relies totally on this exceptional period of climate stability. We were incredibly fortunate to enjoy these unbelievable circumstances and Chakrabarty hammers this chance in his following comment: “Take the case of the agricultural revolution, so called, of around 11,700 years ago. It was not just an expression of human inventiveness. It was made possible by certain changes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a certain stability of the climate, and a degree of warming of the planet that followed the end of the Ice Age (the Pleistocene era)—things over which human beings had no control (…). Without this lucky “long summer,” or what one climate scientist has called an “extraordinary fluke” of nature in the history of the planet, our industrial-agricultural way of life would not have been possible. In other words, whatever our socioeconomic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such as the temperature zone in which mammalian or plant life survives) that work like boundary parameters of human existence.”

Have we been complacent? Didn’t these last ten thousand years of stability give us the confidence that the earth would remain an unyielding ground forever, on which we could act and reap the benefits as we want? Chakrabarty refers to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who made a curious comparison: “We see men building and demolishing houses, and are led to ask: ‘How long has this house been here?’ But how does one come on the idea of asking [that] about a mountain, for example?” We did not ask for ages of mountains because we took them to be a part of the givenness of the earth for humans.” The more I hear about the melting of major glaciers, the more I see these devastations of forest wildfires, gigantic floods, persistent droughts, mountain erosions, or freak storms, the more I am in pain for this wildlife dying on all continents, and the more I feel it’s true that our modern civilization is clashing with the geological time. “The potential for planetary change is almost as great as that caused by the origin of life or the rise of oxygen” alarm the two scientists, Charles Langmuir and Wally Broecker (“How to Build a Habitable Planet”).  

Chakrabarty is rather straightforward in his judgment finger-pointing the European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Locke, Hobbes, Grotius…) who placed humanity on top of all species and subjugated the natural landscapes to be at the full disposition of humans with inexhaustible resources and infinite abundancies. In their minds, the role of nature was simply to take care of humans in any circumstances, so we would not have to worry at all about it. Our political ambition was exclusively focused on our human conditions and how we could provide more security and prosperity for everyone. In the last century, the scope of this aspiration extended to a larger emancipation with “great waves of decolonization, civil liberties movements, feminist movements, agitations for human rights, and globalization.” It is a respectable mission, although at no time we were asking ourselves about the resources required to comply with this objective: “basically, there is an indifference to the biosphere built into political thought.”

The fact is that our planet has experienced an exponential growth of the world population in the last seventy years. We will not blame our ancestral philosophers for not anticipating this unexpected trend, but we could challenge the political decisions taken over the most recent period. Chakrabarty acknowledges that the exponential increase in global population coincides with the emancipation of many nations in the world. I was touched by the way he introduces this sensitive issue in his book. I need to reproduce his text at length to avoid misinterpretation:

“It is impossible for me, as a historian of human affairs, not to notice that this period of so-called great acceleration is also the period of great decolonization in countries that had been dominated by European imperial powers and that made a move toward modernization (the damming of rivers, for instance) over the ensuing decades and, with the globalization of the last twenty years, toward a certain degree of democratization of consumption as well. I cannot ignore the fact that “the great acceleration” included the production and consumption of consumer durables—such as the refrigerator and the washing machine—in Western households that were touted as “emancipatory” for women. Nor can I forget the pride with which today the most ordinary and poor Indian citizen possesses his or her own smart phone or its cheap substitute. The lurch into the Anthropocene has also been globally the story of some long-anticipated social justice, at least in the sphere of consumption. This justice among humans, however, comes at a price. The result of growing human consumption has been a near-complete human appropriation of the biosphere (…). But consider also this important point: if the desire for modernization/development of the vast non-Western middle classes were only a matter of utility, practical advantage, greed, or profit, this desire would simply seem crass and morally indefensible (…). One needs to understand the ethical aspects of such desire if one is to plumb the depths of the human predicament today. This is where, I suggest, the story of anticolonial, third-world modernizers has to be taken into account.”

This observation addresses a sensitive topic of human justice, which has to be brought up for discussion every time we talk about climate issues. “Without coal, on which China and India are still dependent to a large degree (68–70 percent of their energy supply), how would the majority of the world’s poor be lifted out of poverty in the next few decades and thus be equipped to adapt to the impact of climate change?” This is such an important question: the injustice between humans, their suffering and their legitimate needs for dignity and acceptable living conditions is intrinsically embedded in the global ecological overshoot problem. “After all, greenhouse gas emissions have increased almost exclusively through the pursuit of industrial and postindustrial forms of modernization and prosperity. No nation has ever spurned this model of development, whatever their criticisms of one another.” Amitav Ghosh, another marvelous Indian writer, in “The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable”, raises a tricky question on this topic and gives a straight answer: “Is it possible that if the major twentieth-century empires had been dismantled earlier, then the landmark figure of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have been crossed long before it actually was? It seems to me that the answer is almost certainly yes.”

Can we live and pursue such a justice after becoming conscious of this climate crisis? Shouldn’t we re-prioritize our well-being in order to give enough basic technological needs for all the population and adjust accordingly the living conditions in modern countries? On this interrogation, the same Amitav Ghosh brings a rather skeptical reply on the feasibility of such reallocation of resources between the countries. He refers to some study results from the geologist David Archer to justify his statement: “To reach a genuinely fair solution to the problem of emissions would ‘require cuts in the developed world of about 80 percent. For the United States, Canada and Australia, the cuts would be closer to 90 percent.’ Will an abstract idea of fairness be sufficient for people to undertake cuts on this scale, especially in a world where the pursuit of self-interest is conceived of as the motor of the economy? Let’s just say there is much room for doubt.” He uses careful words in his last sentence to tell us that it will clearly not happen this way!

We always come back to the rationality of everyone pursuing their own interest. How could we change politics without falling into an ingenuous trap. The magnificent example of Mahatma Gandhi related by Amitav Ghosh is astonishing. He was a fierce opponent of the Western industrial model of economy. In 1928, when the population of India was one quarter of what it is today, he wrote: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.” And the comment from Ghosh is noticeable: “It is proof that Gandhi, like many others, understood intuitively what Asia’s history would eventually demonstrate: that the universalist premise of industrial civilization was a hoax; that a consumerist mode of existence, if adopted by a sufficient number of people, would quickly become unsustainable and would lead, literally, to the devouring of the planet.” And later in his book, Ghosh comes back to the exemplary behavior of Gandhi and says: “His entire political career was based upon the idea of sacrifice. He was the very exemplar of a politics of moral sincerity”. This estimate destiny confirms admirably a notable quote from Michel Montaigne, the great philosopher of the French Renaissance: “The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our life.”

As a result, without any exception, the whole of humanity embraced the industrial civilization and consumerism, with an insatiable appetite for technology. The geologist Peter Haff introduced the concept of “technosphere” to designate this irresistible expansion of technological objects that conquer the world and take up all the space in our lives, to such an extent that “humans have made Earth into a spaceship for themselves”! We can easily spend days, weeks and months involved in technological processes and networks without any external contact with nature. Peter Haff takes the example of a ship or an airplane, where their passengers are intrinsically dependent on technology, and soon we could say the same for autonomous mobility. The technosphere is everywhere, in mines, constructions, houses, farms, food, water, manufacturing, communication, entertainment, etc. It generates novel entities which are purely human-made, like metal alloys, synthetic minerals, hybrids, chemical components (like the famous and uncontrollable PFAS) … It became a fundamental condition for human life.

However, the technosphere has a significant inconvenience in relation to the biosphere: it does not recycle its own materials and generates billions of tons of garbage in landfills and oceans. The biosphere takes care of living beings, recycling the totality of its waste. We can say that the biosphere promotes diversity and encourages the thriving of beauty and wonders on the planet, while the technosphere, is selfish, clumsy and does not give a damn about her cousin, the biosphere. We bury our garbage in numerous and gigantic landfills, we keep invading the oceans, the soil and the atmosphere. The global waste management market is valued at around $1 trillion, which seems big, but if we compare it to the global GDP of more than $100 trillion it is only 1% which is unsignificant. I recently watched the movie “Village” from Michihito Fujii, a somber and sorrowful story. A waste processing factory stands at the top of a hill, dominating the village underneath with its massive and monstrous concrete walls. Later in the film, we discover with dread that this supposed recycling plant turns out to be a vast landfill littered with polluted trash buried under the ground and contaminating soil, freshwater and the environment. The natural beauty of the Japanese countryside is devastated by the corruption and madness of local politicians encouraged by passive submissive inhabitants. A terrible testimony about the duplicity of actors in the waste management business.

So, not only do we pollute the planet with our garbage, but we also bribe some and make other people suffer from our voracious avidity. The same geologist David Archer (already mentioned by Amitav Ghosh) wrote that “money flows toward short-term gain and toward the over-exploitation of unregulated common resources. These tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy toward his inevitable doom”. I want to place here a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, that Chakrabarty reminds us a couple of times in his book, referring to our common behavior: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not enough for every man’s greed.” 

The rise of the population and the expansion of the technosphere had significant consequences on the planet. This inexorable increase enthuses technology addicts, like Azeem Azhar who created the newsletter “The Exponential View” and wrote an enthusiastic book about this trend. From his angle, the expansion of technologies is driven by three factors: “the power of learning by doing, the increasing interaction and combination of new technologies, and the emergence of new networks of information and trade.” He supports his demonstration with a lot of data and many examples using his own experience with interesting personal views on topics like the risk of monopolistic position for the “Exponential Age superstars” (Amazon, Alphabet, Alibaba, Apple…), the persistent complexity of autonomous mobility, the gig labor conditions in ride-hailing and food delivery sectors, the rise of intangible economy, the serendipity in action in growing cities (I liked this one!), the re-localization of industries “favoring the near over the far”, the creeping power of internet on our private lives, or the increased value of unskilled jobs... As expected, he believes that innovations will be able to address all our problems, including climate change and he recognizes the ascendancy of the technosphere on our civilization that “spill over into every area of our lives, rewiring our approach to business, work, politics – even our sense of self”. In his conclusion, he remains confident in “human’s ingenuity in forging the world we want.” Nowhere in his work appears any comment about the ability of our biosphere to deal with this exponential trend. Despite this oversight, Azhar wrote a quite informative book that I would recommend even, and not the least, to the non-tech lovers!

On the opposite side, there are many observers who look at this exponential development from the biosphere viewpoint and are very concerned. The overpopulation is recognized as a major cause of biodiversity loss (see here) and we cannot ignore the uncontrollable impacts of energy use, fertilizers and pesticides consumption, freshwater depletion, transportation expansion, greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidification, forest overexploitation, damming of rivers, international tourism, industrial and junky food, wildlife extinction, sea level rise, and other disastrous alterations.

In order to measure these impacts, Johan Rockström and his colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Center established in 2009 a scientific framework of “Planetary Boundaries” which highlights key processes considered as “critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of Earth system as a whole”. This evaluation goes far beyond climate change as it considers several other intertwined and deeply connected factors (pollution, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification…) that are essential to evaluate the efficiency of Earth’s resilience “to remain in a ‘Holocene-like’ interglacial state”. If we transgress these boundaries, we take a major risk to disrupt the fragile equilibrium of our miraculous climate period from the last ten thousand years. Unfortunately, in the latest report from 2023, this group of scientists alerted that we are crossing these boundaries one after the other, and six of the nine were overshot already. I provided a copy of the graph from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and added a table on the right side with my own simplified definition of these processes. I hope that I have not streamlined it too much. In any case, all the detailed explanations and results are available in the link here.

By transgressing these nine planetary boundaries, we are the fools that are going to break the delicate balance of our Holocene period. Anyone who recognizes this naked truth would either laugh or cry out loud at our audacity and stubbornness. We became at your expense this awful “geological agent” perturbating the fine-tuned planet conditions which made our life possible on Earth. The clash between geological and human times also means that our technosphere is depleting in a surprisingly short period of time (few dozens of years) the resources that the biosphere created in an extremely long period of time (hundreds of millions of years). We were standing on a treasure that we are wasting impulsively and shamelessly.

3. The Mutual Time

As we introduced in the previous chapter, because the climate crisis is putting our life in vulnerability, the questions of justice between humans cannot be isolated any more from our connection to nonhumans elements on the planet, both living and nonliving. Keeping only a humanocentric approach will not deliver more justice for humans and will further deteriorate the conditions of those living on our planet. We must embrace the natural and the biosphere in our justice system. Politically, our institutions are profoundly anthropocentric. For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is mainly focused on human impacts. There is another Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity which is focused on the biodiversity crisis independently from the IPCC work. In a combined political approach, both of these issues – climate change and biodiversity loss - should be treated together.

Regarding this necessary shift in justice, Chakrabarty shed lights on this subject with two different contributions: The first one from the Pope Francis, who recommends extending human justice not just to animals but “to the entire world of natural reproductive life”. This is a radical deviation from our tradition to strictly separate our human moral life from the natural life on the planet. When we think about natural life, we immediately get compassion for the penguins, the white bears, the elephants or the whales that are dying massively because of our immorality, but Chakrabarty reminds us that “the bulk of life on the planet is microbial”, so we should also pay attention to it, particularly because they might be the main vector to ensure our survival in the future.

I like the way that he introduces the pope’s encyclical: “It is probably the only available Western/European attempt so far to read humanity’s current climate crisis in terms of a deep-set spiritual crisis of modern civilization, albeit within the terms of Catholic theology, but that does not lessen its value. (For an Indian scholar, it is reminiscent of a famous essay Rabindranath Tagore wrote in 1941, the year he died, entitled “The Crisis of Civilization.”) “We are not God,” writes Pope Francis elsewhere in the book, opposing strongly and by implication the view that humans are now the God species. “The responsibility for God’s earth means that human beings, endowed with intelligence, must respect the laws of nature and the delicate equilibria existing between the creatures of the world.”

Interestingly, Amitav Ghosh mentions also the Pope’s Laudato si and I found it funny when he compares its clarity to the opacity of the Paris Agreement… “Because of the prayerful ending of Laudato Si, it might be thought that there would be more wishful thinking and conjecture in the Encyclical than in the Agreement. But that is by no means the case. It is the Paris Agreement rather that repeatedly invokes the impossible.” Ghosh shares the fact that our target to limit the rise of temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius was clearly unreachable since the beginning, and we could suspect that many leaders knew it. He emphasized that the agreement relied on the credulous belief of technological advances to capture greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, however these solutions do not exist and are unlikely to emerge quickly and widely. Reversely, Laudato Si “does not anywhere suggest that miraculous interventions may provide a solution for climate change. It strives instead to make sense of humanity’s present predicament by mining the wisdom of a tradition that far predates the carbon economy. (…). The document returns over and again to the theme of ‘how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society and interior peace.” Ghosh insists on this latest point: in the Paris Agreement, the word poverty is never linked to justice, and always treated as a pure financial issue.

The second contribution brought by Chakrabarty comes from the Indian economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen. Here is another very interesting quote: “The mother has responsibility toward her child not merely because she had generated her, but also because she can do many things for the child that the child cannot itself do… In the environmental context it can be argued that since we are enormously more powerful than other species, this can be a ground for our taking fiduciary responsibility for other creatures on whose lives we can have a powerful influence.” Somewhere else in his book, Chakrabarty comes back to a similar idea saying that we have a role to play to heal the planet, to “assume the shape of secular questions about man’s stewardship of and responsibility to the planet. (…) We gradually forgot the culture of reverence on which all ancient, Indigenous, and even peasant religions were based.”

On this point, I found an interesting statement given by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. To be honest, I never read his work as I was always put off by the reputedly abstruse style of his writing. I did not expect to one day be mentioning his name, so I have to thank Dipesh Chakrabarty for the opportunity to quote one of his quite “easy-to-understand” metaphors, which belies what I just said above: “Heidegger develops his distinction between two modes of relating to the earth: demanding from the earth — the German word is ‘herausfordern’ — and leaving something to the mercy of the earth. He says when a peasant sows a seed, he is leaving it to the mercy of the earth, but when I use artificial fertilizers, I work the land hard. It is as though I was being demanding of the earth, like holding a gun to somebody’s head to rob them. Heidegger clearly favors the position of leaving yourself at the mercy of the earth.”

I was struck by the convergence of the comments from Dipesh Chakrabarty, Amitav Ghosh and Amartya Sen, about the stewardship of natural resources and non-human life, which are fully aligned with what I investigated a few months ago about the Indigenous Wisdom (see my article #23: How Indigenous Wisdom could care for our Technological Society). This is a dimension that was totally missed by the Paris Agreement. Let me dream for a second: wouldn’t it be great if we could integrate this stewardship mission in future Climate COPs? It would be a fantastic improvement and hopefully we would avoid these “bargains, unspoken agreements, and loopholes visible only to those in the know” as Ghosh commented with disappointment in reference to the major conferences.

Talking about stewardship makes me feel we are in communion with nature, that we have reached a spiritual connection with nonhuman life. I think it is the same emotion as the one commented by Rabindranath Tagore in the introduction. Through the years, I investigated a bit this unique experience and learned about a concept called “oceanic feeling”. This qualification came from the correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland in 1927 while they were sharing views about Ramakrishna’s mystic ecstasies. Rolland already faced similar sentiments and described them as a feeling of eternity, of being immersed in “something limitless, unbounded, of being one with the external world as a whole”. Several psychoanalysts strove to provide neurological and psychological explanations to these sentiments, but I prefer to keep the simple spiritual version, which is not necessarily religious, but mainly an intimate connection with nature to such a degree that you feel becoming an element of it.

In his book, Chakrabarty shares several experiences that he describes as a sense of mutuality with Earth and living beings. I feel that they also express a similar emotion to the one experienced by Romain Rolland. This one for example from the Benedictine monk and yogi Bede: “Once, walking out alone in the evening, a lark arose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything that grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth (…) A feeling of awe (…) came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.”

Another one, from the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard: “When walking from the inn over Sortebro to the open ground along the beach, almost a mile north one comes to the highest point around here. (…) This has always been one of my favorite spots. Often, as I stood here of a quiet evening, the sea intoning its song with deep but calm solemnity, my eye catching not a single sail in the vast surface, and only the sea framed the sky and the sky the sea, and when, too, the busy hum of life grew silent and the birds sang their vespers. (…) As I stood there, alone and forsaken, the power of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my nothingness, while the sure flight of the birds reminded me on the other hand of Christ’s words, ‘Not a sparrow will fall to the earth without your heavenly Father’s will[.]’ I felt at once how great and yet how insignificant I am.”

From my personal lectures, I found a lovely representation of this emotion in the relation between The Little Prince and Saint-Exupery. You might remember the last evening before the separation of the two friends. The Little Prince tried to ease the sadness of the author and gave him a heartbreaking lesson of hope: “In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night. You – only you – will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure… And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy.” I take this beautiful message as a gift to immerse ourselves with joy in the eternity of the universe and accept with humility to be just an infinitesimal part of it.  

One more surprise awaited me while reading Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book. The author relates the unfortunate life of an Indian doctoral student, Rohith Vemula, who committed suicide. He did it to express his indignity against the university authorities who condemned him for being an activist of his inferior caste of Dalit. In his parting note, he wrote that the value of a man had always been “reduced to his immediate identity, to a vote, to a number, to a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust.”  This latest sentence stroke me as I was remembering suddenly the story of the Little Prince. “A glorious thing made of stardust.” I think that it is the same emotion that is revealed through the notion of “oceanic feeling”. If 99% of solid things, including our bodies, is empty space as the quantum physics tell us, if we are made of energy, it should be common sense to say that we belong to the ocean, to the earth, to the universe…

Rohith was passionate about the astrophysicist Carl Sagan, and Chakrabarty interpretates it like this: “Carl Sagan’s astrophysics bought him glimpses of a figure of the human liberated from the indignities suffered by the Dalit.” I read Sagan’s publication “The Demon-haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark” and watched his television series from the eighties called “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”. It is true that, at several instances, the scientist said that “we are made of star stuff”! Seeing his passion, his curiosity and enthusiasm for science and nature, I think that Sagan must have experienced many times this “oceanic feeling” fervor.  His book is really pleasant to read. He promotes scepticism thinking in all the circumstances of our life, but insists at the same time that we cannot be completely skeptical. We have to be open to counterintuitive ideas, in short, we have to be open to “wonder”! 

I like his well-thought-out advice: if we cannot associate scepticism with wonder, we might miss great discoveries in science. Here is one of his facetious examples: “Consider this claim: as I walk along, time - as measured by my wristwatch or my ageing process - slows down. Also, I shrink in the direction of motion. Also, I get more massive. Who has ever witnessed such a thing? It's easy to dismiss it out of hand. Here's another: matter and antimatter are all the time, throughout the universe, being created from nothing. Here's a third: once in a very great while, your car will spontaneously ooze through the brick wall of your garage and be found the next morning on the street. They're all absurd! But the first is a statement of special relativity, and the other two are consequences of quantum mechanics (vacuum fluctuations and barrier tunnelling, they're called). Like it or not, that's the way the world is. If you insist it's ridiculous, you'll be forever closed to some of the major findings on the rules that govern the Universe.”

However, this fragile balance between scepticism and wonder is very difficult to judge. We always take the risk to fall in credulity and naïve belief. In his book, Sagan pulls out all the stops against the false visions and faiths that invade our minds: flying saucers, alien abductions, divination, apparitions, astrology, miraculous healing, persecution of witches, haunted houses, necromancy, channelling, spiritualism, hallucinations, prophecies, dragons in garages, angels in the sun… He includes as well funny non-scientific cases like this one concerning the science-fiction series “Star Trek”: “The idea that Mr. Spock could be a cross between a human being and a life form independently evolved on the planet Vulcan is genetically far less probable than a successful cross of a man and an artichoke.” In order to avoid falling in these traps, Sagan details a complete baloney detection kit with nine tools to be applied and twenty fallacies to be identified, which can be summarized by one of his impactful sentences: “When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.”

As always, love is around the corner and would deal with our emotions to make us feel things beyond any rationality. That is how Sagan confesses the intensity of his relationship with his parents in a marvelous way in two instances in his book: “My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are - really and truly - still in existence somewhere. I wouldn't ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them up on the latest news, to remind them that I love them. There's a part of me - no matter how childish it sounds - that wonders how they are. 'Is everything all right?' I want to ask. The last words I found myself saying to my father, at the moment of his death, were 'Take care'.” And later in the book, he comes back to this intense connection: “Probably a dozen times since their deaths I've heard my mother or father, in a conversational tone of voice, call my name. Of course, they called to me often during my life with them - to do a chore, to remind me of a responsibility, to come to dinner, to engage in conversation, to hear about an event of the day. I still miss them so much that it doesn't seem at all strange that my brain will occasionally retrieve a lucid recollection of their voices. Such hallucinations may occur to perfectly normal people under perfectly ordinary circumstances.”

Let me close this moving moment with Carl Sagan in a more humorous way: “One of my favourite cartoons shows a fortune-teller scrutinizing the mark's palm and gravely concluding, 'You are very gullible.'” Without flinching, I rushed to the internet to find this cartoon. After reviewing hundreds of fortune teller’s drawings (many of them very funny with often a crystal ball between the medium and the customer), I selected this one below. Is it the same as the one mentioned by Carl Sagan, I cannot be fully sure, but I hope it is, although we cannot see the palm of the credulous patient!

One last enjoyable anecdote from his book. He mentions another American cartoonist, Gary Larson, who dedicated one of his works as follows: “When I was a boy, our house was filled with monsters. They lived in the closets, under the beds, in the attic, in the basement, and - when it was dark - just about everywhere. This book is dedicated to my father, who kept me safe from all of them.”

All throughout his narrative, Carl Sagan recommends us to combine scepticism, wonder and “a sense of reverence and awe” for science and nature. This suggestion converges distinctively with the comments from Dipesh Chakrabarty, Amitav Ghosh and Amartya Sen on the need to reintroduce respect and reverence in our relationship with the earth and the cosmos. “Something about that reverence has to be brought back to supplement our very Aristotelian sense of wonderment at the miracle of biodiversity. (…) In building a new tradition of political thought that is not simply about human domination of the earth, we would need to find ways of combining elements of both wonderment and reverence in our relationship to the places we inhabit.”

For Hobbes, experience was inferior to science; experience was synonym of prudence and ambiguity, while science was the pearl of human mind, with rationality and infallibility. Yes, science has been spectacular for human flourishing over the past centuries, but this fantastic modernization puts us today at a crossroads: either we keep believing blindly in science and technology, we remain enchained within the technosphere, and continue to expand our domination over the planet with the risk to amplify even more our geological impact. Or, we agree to reverse the priorities, give a chance to the prudence, takes a respectful reverence to the pristine life around us, revive our marvelous sense of wonder, and value above anything else the gifts offered to us by our planet.

I should give the last word to Antoine de Saint-Exupery and his wise character, the fox, who gave the secret of happiness to the little prince. If you are among the very few who don’t know it yet, just go and read the tale to discover his message. As it is secret, I cannot reveal it here. I would rather finish with another quote, that I like very much, which takes place at the beginning of the novel. Saint-Exupery is still in his thoughts; he did not yet meet the little prince. After several unsuccessful attempts to convince the adults to recover their childhood soul, he confesses his lack of appreciation to those who lost their ability of wonderment, their faculty to appreciate the things from their heart. I guess that all the authors that I quoted in this article would acknowledge the tactic that he decides to apply eventually: “I would never talk to that person about boa constrictors, or primeval forests, or stars. I would bring myself down to his level. I would talk to him about bridge, and golf, and politics, and neckties. And the grown-up would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man.”

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