The War of Natures
Hot spots of environmental conflict are spreading throughout the world. We’ve entered some kind of war of natures. An Amazonian hunter-gatherer certainly does not have the same carbon accounting as the CEO of a petrochemical firm in the western world but he suffers the same consequences anyway. For the first time in Geohistory, scientists are just about to declare human activity as the leading force in the shaping of the Earth. Human beings are indeed the most disturbing telluric, geological and climatic factor in the ecosystem. Geologists call this dawning era of uncertainties and change “Anthropocene”. It already goes hand in hand with climatic and environmental disorders, the beginning of Holocene extinction and the increasing loss in human, cultural and linguistic diversity. Who or what is actually responsible for the Anthropocene? The Japanesse farmer growing his thirteen-acre field in Okinawa in a traditional way? The Sami reindeer herder leading 100 heads of cattle through the Finnish snow? The Yanomami horticulturist who hunts, fishes and grows plants 3 hours a day using no fossil fuel but whose Amazonian garden’s energy efficiency is 9 times superior to that of a Beauce farmer’s in France? The worker taking Toulouse’s metro every morning to go to work? The Secretary of State for Transport and Sustainable Development of a great Western Nation-State? The owner of an international pharmaceutical company? The patriarch of a Texan family, who is an oil tycoon at the head of a multinational company based in 46 countries? The Anthropocene takes on its full meaning. And with it, the war of natures has been going on and amplifying for four hundred years. Through a series of portraits collected around the world, the GdRA tells and stages stories of this war, as many desperate battles… So this is the beginning of a new cycle entitled “La guerre des natures”. The first two works in the series are LENGA and DAVI K. They will be written between 2014 and 2017, in the Amazon rainforest, valleys and plains of Rouergue (South West France), theatres in France and elsewhere.
