Dakar, 2135 — From the ruins of what was Dakar — Since the year of what remains

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let me begin not with a cry, but with an act.

I will not write: I hate you.
Hate, however legitimate, still belongs to the register of the heart.
But what concerns you is less of a heart than a judgment.
Less injury than responsibility.
Less resentment than history.

Then I write what must be written.

I accuse your generation of having received a living world and of having chosen to treat it as a stock.
Accuse your time of having looked at the oceans as weirs, forests as inventories, soils as supports, air as an invisible trash, and living the whole as a raw material for your comforts.
I accuse your civilization of having administered the Earth as one liquidates a heritage that did not belong to you.

You have to recognize a particular talent. Destroying in two or three generations what billions of years had slowly composed required genius. A sinister genius, certainly, but genius anyway. You were organized. You were being applied. You had experts, departments, consulting firms, international summits, evaluation reports, indicators, transition strategies, promises of neutrality, group photographs, pens to sign inaction.

You have planned everything, except the essential: the possibility of continuing to live.

I accuse you of having degraded everything into a resource.

You had received something unusual: a living world.

Deep oceans, populated by such ancient and extravagant lives that no human imagination would have dared to invent them. Forests able to make their own rain, breathe for you, filter your faults with patience that you have taken for weakness. Live, rich, dark soils, through invisible alliances between roots, fungi, insects, bacteria, water and time. Still reliable seasons. Rivers still legible. Shorelines still in their place.

You didn't create that. That was precisely what should have made you modest.

It would have been necessary to hold back. Thank you. A form of modesty in front of what preceded you and had to survive you.

• Where there was an ocean, you saw a free trade route and dump.
• Where there was a forest, you saw wood, soy, oil and yield prospects.
• Where there was a mountain, you saw a deposit.
• Where there was a river, you saw a production capacity.
• Where there was an animal, you saw biomass.
• Where there was a future, you saw a present to monetize.

I accuse your time of having renamed the world to make it more available.

A forest ceased to be a forest before it was cut down: it became a « resource ». A river became a « hydraulic potential ». A species became a « biodiversity variable ». The living one stopped being a world to become a line of inventory.

I blame your tongue for being a white weapon.
I accuse your own vocabulary, technical, managerial, of having cleaned the crime before it was even committed.
I accuse your words of being used to dissolve shame.

You had a polite assassin language.

I accuse your time of believing that the Earth would always be silent.

Because it still stood, you believed inexhaustible. Because she was still repairing, you believed docile. Because it absorbed your excesses, you believed infinitely. Because the disaster wasn't immediate, you took it for leave.

I accuse your civilization of having confused time and forgiveness.

But the world does not forgive, nor does it avenge itself. He's responding. He's registering. He's returning. It has more rigorous accounting than your banks and more incorruptible than your courts. Every debt owed to the living remains. Every excess is recorded. Every bill ends up coming.

And the answer came.

• The lights.
• Droughts.
• Floods.
• Crops compromised.
• Killing heatwaves.
• The tablecloths are exhausted.
• Displaced diseases.
• The shores swallowed.
• Forced migration.
• The silence of beasts.

You used to call it a « crisis ». I blame that word itself. Because it wasn't a crisis. A crisis is over. A crisis is resolved. A crisis implies a possible return to the previous state. What you produced was not a crisis, but a lasting alteration of the very conditions of the living world.

The real was simply the word. And you kept calling it an exceptional event.

I accuse your time of offering eternity to its waste.

Among all your inventions, plastic is perhaps the most revealing. Admirable material by its flexibility, lightness and resistance. A terrible matter by the use you made of it. You have entrusted to the indestructible the most derisory tasks. You have given centuries of duration to objects used a few minutes. You have associated eternity with the insignificant.

Plastic: Here's your real monument. Your pyramid. Your epic. Your signature in the bowels of the world.

I accuse your habits of sowing in the oceans, in the sediments, in the fish, in the birds, in the rain and in our bodies the fragments of your laziness packed.

Your bottles, bags, straws, trays, capsules, cutlery « Disposable » — this word alone is already a confession — Still floating in the belly of the world. You gave five centuries of existence to objects used five minutes. You have succeeded in this rare feat: making even granular air, sticky sea, suspicious rain.

I've never seen d'albatros alive. They had disappeared before I was born. But I saw their photos in your archives: large birds open like suitcases, belly filled with caps, colored plastics, brilliance of your comfort. They died of taking you seriously. For believing you were edible.

I accuse your civilization of having entered the chains of life by break-in.
I accuse your progress of being like a sophisticated dump.

I accuse your agricultural models of treating the earth as a body to exhaust.

I'm writing from a world where every crop is a concern. I know what a ground doesn't answer. I know what a hardened, salty, washed, washed soil is, too compact to receive rain, too poor to sustain life for a long time. I know what anxiety is about depending on an unstable sky.

You could still pretend to ignore the link. You could believe that full stalls were enough to prove abundance, that permanent importation was enough to deny the fragility of the seasons, that the technique would always find a solution after the fact.

Then you treated the land as a requisitioned machine: faster, stronger, more profitable.

• Fertilizers.
• Pesticides.
• Herbicides.
• Fungicides.
• Insecticides.

A whole army of suffixes in -cid, professional killers in white coats, certified, subsidized, sold with promise of yield.

You wanted to speed up the living. You wanted to make him return more than he could. You have forgotten that a soil is not a surface, but a depth; Not a support, but a slow, subtle, patient community.

With « feed » the earth, you sterilized. By optimising it, you emptied it. By means of yield, you have produced famine.

It takes centuries to make living soil. You have destroyed in time a mandate, a career, a portfolio of investments.

And when the hunger hit somewhere, you still called him « food crisis », as if the technocratic vocabulary could anesthetize the obscenity of the thing. For you, famine was always elsewhere, in another climate, in another people, in a report broadcast between two advertisements. Now she's not far away. She stopped being a show. It has become a condition.

Accuse your abundance of having been a disguised debt.
I accuse you of having brought our shortage into her.

Accused your memoryless ambition to produce poisons that are more sustainable than humanity itself.

You must recognize an almost metaphysical ambition: you did not just contaminate space, you wanted to contaminate the duration itself. Plutonium will survive your homelands, your languages, your gods, your economic systems and your graves. You have produced poisons capable of lasting millennia in societies unable to think beyond the next mandate, the next fiscal year, the next election deadline.

I accuse your irresponsibility of having buried in the womb of the Earth what you had neither wisdom nor humility to assume.

You have covered your waste with concrete, diagrams, procedures, reassuring reports, standards, promises, signs to prevent future humans of which you were unaware: their language, their culture, their history, perhaps even their way of reading the danger.

Pictograms.

I accuse your century of having summarized its responsibility for the coming millennia to a signpost.

Then time did what it always does. Rock moved. Water's been flowing. The materials have aged. Certainties have fled.

And we inherited unprestigious cancers, suspicious territories, lands that no map dare say lost but that life has already deserted.

I accuse your time of inventing the deferred crime: a crime whose victims have not yet been born at the time of its commission, and whose perpetrators die honorably, well cared for, surrounded, sometimes decorated.

I accuse your indifference of letting the world die in detail.

Maybe this is where your crime is getting the hardest to say. You have not only destroyed beings; You have weakened the very presence of the living. The world has been emptied not always in the crash, but often in discretion. Less insects. Less birds. Less fish. Less songs. Less traces. Less shimmering. The living man withdrew in small successive subtractions, until the day when the morning seemed too quiet.

I know that calm. I know he's not peace. I know it's an absence.

You called it « loss of biodiversity ». I blame this formula too clean. For what was lost was not only the number of species. It was the texture of the world. His rumor. His music. His right to be broader than human.

• The northern white rhinoceros.
• The vaquita.
• White corals — As if dying could be a simple matter of color.
• Amphibians without burial.
• Anonymous pollinators.
• The tiny creatures you haven't even had time to learn the names.

You've lost the world in detail. And you gave this hecacomb scholarly names to continue dinner in peace.

Because a curve doesn't scream. Because a statistic does not bleed. Because a species that disappears has no ministry, no shareholders, no army or seat in the assembly.

Today, dawn rises in a silence that your ancestors would not have understood. The day appears without orchestra. The sky lights up, but something is not responding.

I accuse your civilization of never stopping perfecting destruction.

In your discharge, you were constant. You've never stopped fighting you. When you weren't burning oil, you were burning cities. When you do not minimize the soil by industrial agriculture, you literally minimize it. When you didn't subsidize extraction, you subsidized weapons. You were unable to permanently protect a swamp, but perfectly able to spray a city in minutes.

You still lacked the means for justice. Never for destruction.

You organized climate conferences and defence salons in the same world, sometimes with the same planes, the same carpets, the same badges, the same handshakes. On one side, save humanity. On the other hand, perfect his killing. And that contradiction didn't seem to bother anyone.

When the resources came to be missed, you militarized the shortage. Water has become a border. The fertile land, a siege issue. Migration is a security problem. Drought is an opportunity to sell more weapons, more walls, more surveillance.

Your experts were talking about « climate wars ». You found the expression relevant. Then you signed contracts.

Even accuse your moral accounting. Because even military broadcasts enjoyed some sort of immunity in you. Tanks burned unprinted, bombardments seemed to occur off-balance sheet, warships sailed in statistical innocence.

I accuse your civilization of knowing, and continuing.

This is the heart of your guilt. You knew a lot. Maybe more than any generation before you. You had science, models, data, satellites, reports, testimonies, maps, alerts, historical precedents. You could measure the disaster in real time and predict its consequences with remarkable precision.

But knowledge did not save you because it did not convert to courage.

There were conferences, summits, agreements, goals, strategies, promises of neutrality, roadmaps, ambitious partnerships. This was not nothing. Yet all this was too little, too late, too cowardly, too reversible.

You produced language to avoid the act.

Every decade brought his new promise. Each promise repelled the moment when it was necessary to touch the essential: your comfort, your annuities, your habits, your religion of growth. You were very brave in the face of 2050. Much less to the lobby sitting in the front row.

Basically, you didn't lack intelligence or moral decision.

I accuse your geopolitical hypocrisy of looting first, then preaching.

I'm writing from Africa, and it matters. Because the disaster you have made has never been also produced or suffered. Those who have most altered the world have not always been the ones who first received the hardest blows. There was a clear historical continuity here: extraction here, profit elsewhere; vulnerability here, protection elsewhere; suffering here, speech there.

You were willing to talk about humanity as a whole when it was necessary to allocate responsibility. You were once again passionate about borders, sovereignty and competitiveness when it came to sharing profits.

Accuse your word we to have served to share fault without ever sharing privileges.

You have presented your exhaustion model to the South as a desirable horizon: individual car, air conditioning, concrete, extraction, industrial meat, disposable objects, increasing consumption, general imitation of your excesses. Then, when the others wanted to enter into this toxic banquet, you seriously discovered that the planet had limits.

After emptying the buffet, you explained to the last arrivals that it was necessary to practice sobriety.

Africa received your chains, then your loans, then your advice. Your mining companies, then your NGOs. Your sermons on adaptation, after your centuries of extraction.

I am writing to you from Dakar, or from what was Dakar. City of wind, salt, traffic, rumors, tea, fish, markets, childhood and light. City that looked at the sea as a familiar presence.

J'accuse your facade sentimentality.

I think many of you truly loved their children. That's what makes your bankruptcy even more tragic. You didn't necessarily want to hurt them. You wanted to offer them security, ease, mobility, goods, the chances you considered enviable. But you had so deeply confused happiness with accumulation, comfort and material expansion that you did not see what you took away from them by believing that you would fill them.

• You gave them toys and removed the seasons.
• You gave them screens and reduced the sky.
• You promised them the future while entering the very conditions of this future.

You said: « It's for our children. » I accuse this formula, still today, in its obscenity.

For them, you have air-conditioned, concreted, imported, flown, packed, extracted, speculated, subsidized coal, subsidized oil, filled the oceans with stupid objects and air with durable particles. Funny tenderness. Funny legacy.

Some of your children have spoken. They walked, shouted, manifested, waved your own numbers with the exact fear in their eyes. They asked for one simple thing: that adults cease being children.

I accuse your time of hearing these children without ever consenting at the cost of listening to them.

You applauded them with emotion. Then you took over the business.

You gave them awards for their courage and contracts to those who were preparing for their condemnation. It took a particularly refined cynicism to turn the youth alert into a moral setting for your inertia.

I accuse your civilization of having made the disaster compatible with the good conscience.

Maybe this is your biggest crime. You weren't all monsters. You were basically ordinary. And it is this ordinarity that accuses you the most. The disaster was not always done in fury or delusion. It is woven into routines, arbitrations, purchases, investments, vacations, habits, tiny renunciations, reasonable compromises in short sight.

It accuses your comforts, routines, reasonable arbitrations, modest compromises, distributed cowardices, of composing together the mechanics of disaster.

Evil, in your home, did not always have the form of declared cruelty. He had that of postponement, delegation, habit, ordinary purchase, immediate convenience, « It's not that bad. », « We'll see later. », « That's beyond the individual. », « I'm already doing my part. ».

I write because someone has to keep the register. I write because silence would add to the disaster the insult of forgetfulness. I write for those who may still be born, that they may know that none of this was a fatality fallen from heaven. It was neither a curse, nor a divine anger, nor a cosmic accident. It was an accumulated choice. A sum of human decisions. Millions of small permissions granted to the inacceptable.

Truth, even late, remains a form of care.

And yet I refuse to grant you your last consolation: nihilism.

I refuse to say that everything was written. I refuse to believe that man was destined to devour to his own home. I refuse to allow you the luxury of thinking that your fault was only human nature.

Because something remains.

• Seeds stored in boxes, pockets of fabric, fresh cellars, hand marked by people you probably thought archaic.
• Agricultural gestures that could clean up the land instead of exhausting it.
• Community knowledge that your models were treating as late and that is now more valuable than your doctrines.
• Forests saved not by big statements, but by stubbornness.
• Languages that still know how to thank the rain.
• Hands that still repair.
• Peoples who had never completely broken with the rhythms of the living.

I blame your contempt for underestimating everything that, silently, already knew how to survive without ravaging.

There is also our anger.

Not your spectacular TV set anger. Not your temporary social network indignation. A dense, serious, orientated anger. An anger that does not just curse, but indicates a limit. That says: this will no longer be tolerated. Which says: We now know the real price of your amenities. Says never again your comfort against our breathing.

We will do otherwise.

Not because we would be purer, wiser or nobler than you. Who could swear? But because we no longer have the privilege of illusion. You could still believe in consoling fictions: clean growth, technological miracle, green market, happy decoupling, automatic repair. We live after the slogans.

The lesson is written in our lungs. In our water. In our hunger. In our summers too long. In our mornings without birds.

Epilogue — Accused

You could have written to us.

Not a report. Not a treaty. Not a final release. A letter.

A simple human letter, without jargon, without communicating, without ulterior thought, in which you would have said:

You didn't.

Then I write mine.

I accuse you of stealing more than a climate, more than a landscape, more than biodiversity.

I accuse you of stealing from those who come after you the basic trust that a child should be able to give to those who precede it.

And in the court where I quote you, there is no statute of limitations, no appeal, no procedure to dissolve the fault in the comfort of abstractions. There's the facts. There's poisoned water. There's dead soil. There are the missing species. There are destroyed cities. There's our lungs. There are our silences. There's our dead.

I'm not waiting for your answer.
I'm not waiting for your defense.
I'm not waiting for your verdict.