Adapting to crisis situations What the Megafires Say About Our Society

"The house burns and we look elsewhere" These comments President Chirac at the Johannesburg Summit foot of the letter, when pest fires multiply, including the forest of Fontainebleau, close to the estate of Campus of Transition, through a France subjected to heat waves successively. We also remember the huge fires that devastated Canada in the summer of 2023, destroying millions of hectares of forest equivalent to the area of Japan.

Scientists warn us that we need to move on of a probabilistic mode of reasoning to the consideration of uncertainty and the permanent possibility of the disaster. The question is how to make us capable of us. adapting to various crisis situations, without limiting ourselves to programmable linear temperature evolution logics or degradation of the living. This involves changing software, and to recognize the bankruptcy of a method of reasoning based on the control of clearly identified and separated phenomena Other. Changing logic is, in the terms of the ecologist Olivier Hamant, replacing robustness with performance, ensuring the stability and viability of humans and living environments despite large fluctuations. Recognize interdependencies and Vulnerabilities, and seek to act at the root of problems: We must both invoke for our political societies a duty to mitigate - that is to say energy output fossil fuels, decarbonization of our production methods, moving, heating, feeding... and a duty adaptation (or adaptability) to chaotic situations, that is to ensure access to goods and basic services for a decent life. You can see it. disaster will be even stronger and that we do not take the path of sobriety, of the "prosperity without growth" density growth based on fossil energy extraction and non-renewable resources); and each disaster is the more strongly felt as the means of dealing with it were not anticipated.

Public policy preparation is key: as regards fires, the book published by Joëlle Zask in 2019, When the forest burns, is a summer reading exciting applied political philosophy. The thesis of the philosopher is to show how this phenomenon of megafoils 90% of which have a human origin and 40% are criminal, is a fact total socio-natural, which says complicity between on one side and the logic of compartmentalization of knowledge and practices that cause global warming, and the other, the means to fight the fires. On often individualizes responsibilities, including of arsonists or firefighters : but the megafires are for one part the result of refusal to accept brulis, directed lights, "domesticated" in a sense, as they was practiced in history, and recently again by the Aboriginal peoples. The author puts particular emphasis on the Australian concept of "cleaning country", a form of "care" of the earth: The development of the territories goes through the fires.

This vision is quite close to that carried by philosophers American living, Emerson and Thoreau, from a care to be cultivated of nature, as well as of anthropocentrism and the concern for the preservation of Wild. Thus it is a matter of pleading for dialogue between natures related to various cultures. To be able to find ways of to combat present and future disasters, it is urgent value the complexity, diversity of policy instruments, dialogue between residents, users, foresters, firefighters, etc. of feed a truly democratic approach, in line with John Dewey on ways to consider community from the 'great society'. In this sense, according to Joëlle Zask, the approach American border can be revisited as openness to novelty and unforeseeability and be related to the notion of the horizon to care for, through the landscapes. Finally, in view of the increase in the number and frequency of megafires, facing the abominations generated by the fire that destroys all, it is a question of becoming aware of the instrumentalisation possible fire in a pyro-terrorism logic, tool and demotivation of populations with then lost their heritage and horizon. In dark contexts, make the wish that collective lucidity greater on the roots of mega-fires and our incuries, we allow us to better prepare ourselves for the unedited, by mutual care of our common world.
Cécile Renouard