Fire in Australia: "The wild dromedary on the continent in flame, has become a danger for Man"

Each Sunday evening, François Clauss concludes the two hours of the Grand journal by Wendy Bouchard with a very personal perspective on the news.

Good evening Wendy,

It's an image, it is anchored in me, obsessive for a week now. Snipers on board helicopters chase thirsty herds of wild dromedaries in the Australian desert to coolly kill them with gusts. A large-scale massacre that will last 5 days. On arrival we will do the accounts: 5,000 animals slaughtered. We are in the state of South Australia, on a continent plagued by the most gigantic fire in its history. Thirsty, the wild dromedaries try to invest the last wells of water, they threaten the reserves of the men, certain beasts exhausted, do not have the strength to go up wells, their corpses contaminate drinking water.

The wild dromedary on the continent in flame, became a danger for the man. Terrible reversal of history, when we know that these beasts were artificially deported from India in the middle of the 19th century allowed, that they allowed man to conquer the arid Australian desert. Without dromedaries, no transport of goods, no railway, there simply would not have been man in this hostile part of the world.

200 years later, here is the countering man turning into a cruel predator. 10,000 km² burned on the Australian continent, as if for us in Europe, Portugal had been reduced to ashes in less than 5 months.

On the island of Kangaroo, 45 km by ferry from the big city of Adelaide, one of the most beautiful animal sanctuaries in the world, on a charred ground, strewn with corpses of animals, rangers have been trying for a week now save dying baby kangaroos and koalas. And meanwhile, on the side of Davos.

And yet and yet, Wendy, there is also a very small, new music, which was heard on the side of Davos, this year. Here are 750 business leaders from around the world who formulate yes, the commitment to no longer emit the slightest greenhouse gas by 2050. 750 business leaders, who may have been moved by the corpses of dromedaries , but who may have mainly looked at the latest figures on the world stock market, noting that TESLA, the world's leading manufacturer of electric cars, (so mocked a few years ago), was worth more today than General Motors and Ford together, that analysts at the big Swiss bank UBS, estimated the transfer of funds that will switch from oil to green energy by 2050 at 10 trillion dollars.

We could save dromedaries, we could avoid fires with 10 trillion dollars. While waiting in an emergency, it is not the big ones who act but indeed the small ones.

Look, Caroline Masson, you don't know her. She is the director of an animal park in Hérault, it is she who launched a call on Facebook so that we send all discontinuing cases to Australia of small pouches of tissue, the only means of saving baby kangaroos and ko -alas threatened with death because deprived of their maternal pockets. The Facebook call was received in a few hours by 2 million people, and it is thousands of pouches, which were manufactured everywhere in France, in EPADHS, schools by thousands of anonymous hands animated by the only desire 'to act.

Look, Julien Job, director of a center for camelids, in Feignies in the North, who opens an online kitty to try to repatriate by plane, to his home some 200 dromedaries. Some will see only helpless and derisory drops of water thrown on the Australian furnace, and yet these signs, it must be understood, that we hear them all up there in the Swiss mountains of Davos. They reflect deep human concern, as if Australia on fire and its dromedary corpses were the mirror of our collective anguish.

From this terror of a sudden apocalypse suddenly so close, let us know Wendy at least to drink from it, in what we have left of conscience, to dream of another world like the one I had the chance to rub shoulders with a few days ago crossing a magnificent desert on the back of a dromedary, in the footsteps of what was then a grandiose, flourishing civilization, based on commerce and trade, it was the time, still where men and dromedaries lived in perfect harmony.