To respond to the theme of this painting, I would simply like to begin with Laudato si’ and reflect on the originality of the idea, as anthropological as it is theological, that Pope Francis puts forward in his encyclical. I’d like to read this text in order to show how it brings about a clear inversion of the end times scenario. And I don’t think the consequences of this inversion have been drawn out enough (or their impact on iconography made visible in Rauch’s work). To take up the question of what the Anthropocene does to the theology of Creation, it goes without saying that I have no particular qualifications relating to the two elements that I want to link, except perhaps having followed the literature on the Anthropocene fairly closely.

In this paper, two specialists of Gaia theory, one from the humanities and the other from Earth System Science (Exeter University), make a sustained effort to list the misunderstandings created by those who have either rejected or accepted Gaia too readily. They argue that the uniqueness of the phenomenon and of the arguments made by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, has been under-recognized. Neither mechanical nor organismic metaphors can render justice to the originality of Gaia. They show that the core of the discovery is to grant agency back to life forms and that Gaia is the highly complex result of their extension in space and duration in time. They conclude that Gaia is different from the concept of nature, difference that opens a new way to look at the connection between biology and politics which they define as extension of the domain of freedom.

Foregrounding the importance of soil and more generally the surface of the Earth —what is now often called the Critical Zone (CZ)— remains very difficult as long as the usual planetary view, familiar since the scientific revolution, is maintained. In this joint effort between a landscape architect, a historian of science and a geochemist, we offer an anamorphosis which allows to shift from a planetary vision of places located in the geographic grid, to a representation of events located in what we call a Gaia-graphic view. We claim that such a view because it gives pride of place to the CZ is much better suited to situate the new actors of the Anthropocene.

This paradox of insisting on sovereignty just at the time when it is becoming even more ill adapted than before, can be sharpened. A legitimate desire for protection and identity is being transformed into a denial that what allows this protection and identity actually comes from resources that exist beyond the apparent limits defining any given body. Nowhere is this requirement clearer than in the question of global climate mutation: to withdraw inside the narrow limits of nation-states is the surest way to threaten the safety and livelihood of those same nation-states, and even, for some low lying countries, to risk their existence altogether. If we accept to define Real-Politick as a selfish defense of one’s own national interest, then it should be realistic to take into account all those external factors on which the self depends. In some ways, this is what brought the 189 nation-states to some sort of agreement in Paris in December 2015: even if they reacted much too late, it is in the name of Real Politick that they were forced to take into account the legitimate power of the climate that ignores all national boundaries but that weighs on all of them. Nations did not stop to pursue their interests, but they were forced to accept that those interests were entangled in such a way that drawing the precise limits of those interests had become impossible. Even if you suppose that hard-nose geo-politics obliges States to remain selfish, you will have to recognize how terribly difficult it is for any one of them to draw the exact boundary around the self at the time of ecological crisis.