Dominique Bourg: the coronavirus "will disturb our societies over the long term"

Text by: Marine Jeannin Follow

Philosopher and honorary professor at the University of Lausanne, former president of the scientific council of the Nicolas Hulot Foundation, Dominique Bourg returns for RFI on the changes brought about by the coronavirus pandemic in our societies.

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RFI: Unlike natural disasters, the disease affects the wealthy classes as well as the poorest. Couldn't this be seen as an opportunity to rediscover a sense of the common?

Dominique Bourg: Indeed, the coronavirus ignores the bank account. But the reaction of society is very much linked to social classes. Only people who work with their hands will work . When you are confined with a large family in a small apartment, you are not in the same situation as a better-off person in a house with a garden. And then the tension falls on battered women, abused children ...

Do you think this crisis situation will last?

The virus will not go away overnight, that's for sure. If we look at the forecasts, the curve in France really goes back down at the end of July. And after ? It is difficult to find drugs that are conclusive and without side effects. If you find a vaccine , it takes at least a year and a half to produce it, and vaccinating eight billion people will not be a snap. We have at least two years of this business. Obviously, not two years of strict confinement, but two years of finding ways to fight the virus, to adapt… It is a momentary crisis, but one that will disturb our societies and our economies over the long term.

What structural changes can we expect?

From a health point of view, wearing a mask in Western countries will probably become a habit , as in Asia. It is possible that we are aligned with Japan, for example, which has extremely strict hygiene and respect for health rules, and which is much less affected than the others.

There are also very clear political challenges. In France, it is clear that the State has not replenished stocks, had nothing planned, that it has systematically deleted hospital beds for a decade ... All of this is extraordinarily destructive. In the United States, it will be even more severe, because people are not even insured. Those who are insured are by work, but there, there are 10 million unemployed at once! The health disaster is going to be gigantic. The only Covid-19 completely calls into question the intellectual leaching carried out by the neoliberals.

And then we will have other pandemics, since we destroy ecosystems and the inhabitant of certain species. Until now, bats have bothered us, but they may come from elsewhere. We will be much more prone to vector-borne infectious diseases [infectious diseases transmitted by vectors, mainly insects and mites, such as malaria, editor's note]. We are entering a period of health fragility and awareness of this vulnerability from which we are not about to leave.

► Read also: Coronavirus: can the health crisis cause an ecological awakening?

Can we read what is happening to us as a form of nature warning?

Yes. We can only interpret what is happening to us as a consequence of the destruction we have inflicted on it. There is a direct link between environmental destruction, climate change and pandemics . But it has not yet passed to the public: people have trouble understanding that it is an ecological problem. We always thought that we were above nature, and that by our technique, by our economy, we could emancipate ourselves from it. And today we are reminded of our vulnerability. But this reminder, this health crisis, as horrible and deadly as it is, is not much compared to what awaits us.

What awaits us?

Given what we have already released, the average temperature increase on Earth will be 2 degrees by 2040. At the moment, we are 1.1 degrees. 2 degrees, this means that in certain regions, several days a year, the heat and humidity could accumulate so that they saturate the thermal regulation capacities of the inhabitants. In other words, your temperature goes up, you can no longer dissipate the heat from your body: and you will die. It may happen in certain regions between the tropics, India, Brazil, certain African countries ... And if you are between 3.5 and 4 degrees higher, which is the trend we are on, this period will extend over several weeks, and will largely exceed the intertropical zone.

Today, we fear that food will no longer reach us, we are not afraid that it will be produced insufficiently. But if you look at the sorghum and rice crops in Australia today , at the end of their summer season, they have dropped by 66%. So imagine having this in several places in the world? There, we could really be in shortage. And this shortage, the more the temperature of the globe increases, the more likely it becomes.

Like the health crisis, the ecological crisis will hit the whole world. Could we not envisage a global response?

For the coronavirus, we are currently idling, but we then expect a return to normal. For the ecological crisis, it's something else! If we wanted to avoid this two-degree warming, according to the IPCC, we would have to reduce global emissions by at least half in 10 years. This is not a hand brake, this time. It is downright engine power that must be drastically reduced in 10 years. But do you know of a government that will do that? Do you think a Trump will do that? A Bolsonaro? Even a Macron? It will take a part of civil society, which understands that what it lived there was only a simple repetition of what awaits us, is manifested, so that we can do something else. What you need to do is decelerate, strong, over several years, and it's already a huge change. Then, it would be necessary to find a cruising speed with a structuring of the economy and consumption which has nothing more to do with today. You would have far fewer small products, disposables, and more sophisticated goods which would be durable, poolable. It would be a war economy at first, by completely and rapidly changing the production apparatus, and then, secondly, a lasting change in lifestyle. The stakes are enormous.

I think that governments will not want to go in this direction, but more and more people will no longer agree with the direction we want to give them. One could imagine in the future a “green” wave much larger than what we have known until then, or a presidential election where neither of the two “classic” contenders passes, or even that European governments completely change their shoulder rifle. It's not the most likely scenario at all, but it's the one we have to fight for.

More than the majority of French people do not want to return to the previous situation. They want to change society. We saw it in three polls published between November and early January, which showed that even with different questions, we fell on about 59% of the population who understood that we will not escape sobriety. It's enormous ! There will be a power relationship between these people and those who do not want to understand anything. A party will become violent, because it has understood that we are going to kill it. And at that point, we will become almost nostalgic for confinements.

Can we see in what is happening today the beginnings of a collapse?

I never speak of collapse in the singular, but collapse in the plural. In southern Italy, these days, there have been riots in supermarkets. This is typical of a collapse scenario as sold to us. There may be areas that collapse in some countries, yes. We are not there yet, but we cannot dismiss this hypothesis out of hand.

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