Mutation, the human adventure has only just begun

The LCI channel headlined this weekend: "MUTATION - The British Prime Minister warned on Saturday that the spread of the Delta variant in his country was " very worrying ", raising fears of a postponement of the lifting of the last anti-Covid restrictions". The use of the word "mutation" has a strong impact, in reality and also, in our imagination, as science fiction authors have well understood: we think of the X-Men film series.

A mutation is a sudden and radical change, rather than a gradual transition. It is a rapid and profound transformation whose intensity of impact is felt, without realizing or seeing everything that is happening and the scope of its effects.

Obviously, talking about our world in crisis in terms of change and mutation makes sense. But more than a change outside of us, is it not a metamorphosis and mutation of each of us?

"Viruses mutate, they adapt and transform to continue living. Why not us?" This question runs through the book Mutation, the human adventure is just beginning ¹, published a few days ago. We know the author, Nathanaël Wallenhorst, a teacher-researcher at UCO, an expert on the Anthropocene, this new geological period marked by the dominant impact of human activities on ecosystems and at the origin of global warming.

In fact, the question concerns a mutation of humanity immersed in an odyssey ² of life.

During the last four centuries of Western history, the separation between humanity and nature has "given free rein to all abuses", as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss already pointed out in 1962 ( Structural Anthropology, 1962). The change we must experience is to radically end this separation. To do this, Nathanaël Wallenhorst proposes "a model capable of thinking about the change in the Anthropocene", a model that he calls "the human adventure" and that he draws according to three components. First, it is necessary to control the capacity for destruction of which man is capable and which manifests itself in limitless economic logic. Second, comes the recognition of our common belonging to life which is always "exchange, circulation, sharing". "The sharing of food that gives life" induces a logic of responsibility for all. Thirdly, let us acknowledge that we coexist before existing: we must “think together about the living and its environment, the organism and its biotope”, in a logic of hospitality.

This human adventure has the flavor of an odyssey, with journeys and learning experiences. This is why the mutation and the current human adventure invite us to think in a radically renewed way about education in the era of the Anthropocene, educating to think about reality and what we do, educating to learn the language of the earth and love of the world, love of the world as Hannah Arendt called it.

1- Nathanaël Wallenhorst, Mutation. The human adventure has only just begun, Le Pommier, June 2021.
2- François Prouteau, Odyssey for a habitable Earth, Le Pommier, October 2021.