Professional practice with awareness and connection

An ethical analysis of a career path.

Ethics as a Compass

The research I carried out at the CNRS, and subsequently at the Société Européenne de Propulsion, from September 1978 to August 1983, focused on the synthesis and characterisation of new refractory composite materials based on carbon and titanium carbide. These materials were intended for the manufacture of a new generation of spacecraft nozzles. The space programme absorbs enormous financial resources that decision-makers allocate without batting an eyelid, whilst they allocate funds for humanitarian, social and environmental causes with indecent parsimony. My research could also have been used for military applications in missile propulsion. These disturbing realisations had undermined my motivation and created a morally untenable situation. I therefore made it my duty no longer to place my time, energy or intellect at the disposal of a sector I considered immoral. And so I resigned from my post as a research engineer to embark, without support or guarantees, on the adventure of self-employment in the service of an ethical cause. This change in my professional life also enabled me to move to the countryside, as I have a deep admiration and passion for nature – a legacy of my childhood spent as a farmer’s child in a remote and rather poor rural area (I am, in fact, very familiar with farming, having worked as a farmhand on my parents’ farm). That is also why, in my spare time during that brief period as a salaried employee, I put together a slideshow explaining the role and importance of hedgerows for the climate, biodiversity, hydrology and, ultimately, for agriculture itself. Indeed, during my youth, I was appalled by the systematic destruction of my native hedgerow landscape, which was an integral part of my very being. I experienced the gutting of the bocage, the sunken lanes and the dry-stone walls that bordered my village – all to make way for a bypass and to industrialise agriculture – as if I had been amputated. Having succeeded in selling this slideshow to the Land Consolidation Office of the Ministry of Agriculture, I decided, in 1984, after resigning from the Société Européenne de Propulsion, to base my independent professional activity on public environmental education, at a time when environmentalism was viewed with suspicion (the fact that environmental conservation, vital to humans, was – and still is – poorly perceived is truly incomprehensible…).For twenty years, I designed and produced numerous media projects on these issues, before moving into higher education to teach on topics such as sustainable development, ethics and complexity.

In 2005, having concluded that public awareness of these issues was well advanced but was not being translated into corresponding action, I trained in the Bilan Carbone® programme to help businesses reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Having also long engaged in philosophical and metaphysical reflection on humanity and the world, I have now reached some rather unconventional conclusions on difficult and rarely discussed subjects – yet ones which I consider essential to raise in this new phase of societal evolution. Modern mythology is a dualistic and materialistic mythology. According to this view, the world is a world of things, a world of objects dissociated from subjects and serving human ends. The understanding of the world, including humans, is utilitarian. This forges relationships with nature and social relationships that are based on possession and domination, as well as a predatory conception of the economy. This is why the ethical transformation of organisations calls for a rethinking of our mythology, and thus a process of developing new metaphysical frameworks. The ‘greening’ of organisations, which is finally being considered – albeit rather belatedly – is necessary, but it is taking shape within the same utilitarian paradigm. Is it merely a question of ensuring the long-term sustainability of the services nature provides to humankind? The environmentalist vanguard struggles to understand the roots of the problem, and ecological progress will not resolve the torments of domination, violence and the denial of dignity towards humans, living beings and otherness in general. I am therefore now working towards the emergence of an active ethical consciousness within the worlds of business, research and higher education. Indeed, the belated greening of mindsets and organisations now exposes humanity to a series of major crises. Yet resistance to change remains strong despite this realisation. Human relations will therefore become strained. In this highly uncertain and turbulent context, activists for change will face enormous psychological and psychosocial difficulties. Whilst it is essential to forge bonds in order to cooperate, it remains no less vital to help people demonstrate commitment, freedom, autonomy, courage, resilience and detachment.

For me, the sense of commitment is not primarily a matter of magnanimity, but arises in the same way that cells are engaged in cooperative processes within a living organism. A major problem of our time is political disengagement (in the noble — and all too rare — sense of the word ‘politics’) and the breakdown of social bonds, at various levels, driven by individualism, identity-based withdrawal, an obsession with exploitative hoarding, disengagement from the present through a fantasised projection of a better future, and so on.

I wish to contribute to the development of the principles of thinking and acting within complexity, in order to unleash the collective’s potential for transformation, which is currently trapped within reductionism, binary thinking and powerlessness. I cultivate, both within and without, that which enabled Nikos Kazantzakis to write: ‘I hope for nothing, I fear nothing […], I am free’ (Ascèse, 1922).