environment

As this article goes to press (December 2019), the bush fires that have been raging for weeks through six Australian states, from Queensland to Western Australia, have consumed 12.5 million acres of land and the death toll is mounting. They continue to wreak disaster as record-breaking temperatures average over 400C.

Bernard Charbonneau’s The Garden of Babylon (1969) is not only an impassioned, deeply personal and nostalgic manifesto on behalf of nature, traditional farming and rural culture—which are being destroyed by industrial and urban expansion and by government policies supposedly designed to save them but which in fact only promote financial interests and mass tourism—but also a revolutionary polemic on behalf of human freedom, whose indivisible unity with nature was ambiguously reflected in the “feeling of nature” that arose during the 18th century: “it was no mere coincidence that the century that discovered nature was also the century of the individual and his freedom”.

Only in a communist world without states and borders will human beings be able to really tackle the damage that has been done to their natural surroundings.

It did not take the fatal consequences of recent record temperatures in Western Europe, or the recent wildfires in California, monsoon floods in Nepal, India and Bangladesh or the Mozambique cyclones, to tell us that something has radically shifted in the world’s climate. The existential threat of human-created climate change to life on the planet has been understood for decades. NASA, among others, first sounded the alarm about global carbon emissions in 1988 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed the same year.