Today, the mountain is like like any commercial product. Its ethereal peaks are the new prey of our hubris, of our desires for conquest and performance. The wild has become Instagrammable. A place of showmanship and ego.
We learned this week that 22-year-old YouTuber Inoxtag would have succeeded in climbing Everest. A challenge that he had launched as a big game, a form of sporting excellence for the modest sum of 1.2 million euros. At the same time, traffic jams reached the Himalayan peaks. Nepal has issued nearly 500 permits in 2024 for the ascent of Everest despite the risks involved. Lines of climbers line up along the wall. Before even reaching the summit, 40,000 people now gather each year at the first base camp, at an altitude of 5,300 meters, as we recalled in March 2023.
The logic of neoliberalism at its peak
The high mountains have become the leisure park of the ultra-rich. The place where they deploy their new destructive and polluting whims. The front runners push the logic of neoliberalism to its climax. For a selfie on the roof of the world, they are ready to abandon any form of collective responsibility: they transform the mountain into a landfill, abandoning their equipment, their excrement and even the corpses of their companions who did not withstand this extreme physical ordeal.
How far away the days of Élisée Reclus and sincere mountain lovers seem. A time for peaceful contemplation and measurement. In his Story of a mountain (1880), the libertarian geographer recounted his passion and respect for these infinite spaces, these chaos of rock and ice. “ We live like aphids on an elephant’s skin »he wrote, before inviting humility.
It would be good today to remember this. In The Wild Part of the World (Seuil, 2018), the philosopher Virginie Maris protests against the idea that every natural space should now be appropriable. With this ultimately hackneyed story, this sad repetition of the fantasy of omnipotence, humanity has abolished the Earth as otherness.
We are not everywhere at home
“ The idea that the entire Earth is expanding, available, habitable, appropriable, is an idea so strange that it could be the product of a diseased mind »she affirms, before adding: “ We must know how to inhabit the Earth better, more soberly, with more kindness for non-human living things and care for the landscapes. But perhaps we must also agree to limit ourselves, restrict our territory ».
It is about fighting against total habitation and limiting the human empire. We are not everywhere at home. We do not ethically have the right to absorb nature and develop it from all sides.
Our adventure stories must change
This is perhaps the lesson of environmentalists. Behind the learning of humility there is also a question of emancipation. We never break free alone. It is in a physical connection with the elements, in coherence and attention with the living, that we can build a better society. And not in its crushing.
In his latest book, The unexplored (Wildproject, 2023), Baptiste Morizot urges us to change our myths and our adventure stories. In the age of the Anthropocene, at a time when glaciers are melting and rocks are breaking away due to global warming, our imagination must change. What sense is there in wanting to surpass oneself in a world that is collapsing, in a world that is falling apart? ?
We must find wonder elsewhere. “ The unexplored is no longer located in distant and deserted landsdescribes Baptiste Morizot. The unexplored is the weaving of living things among themselves and with us, under our feet, in their ethological, ecological and evolutionary, historical, social and political dimensions. The unexplored are relationships. In and with the living ».
“ Debellicizing, dephallocratizing, de-exoticizing exploratory affects »
The exploratory affects carried by the West and modernity are destructive. The adventurer is the scout of colonialism and imperialism. Just look today at how Sherpas are treated, ready to die for the pleasure of their wealthy clients. So, it’s time to “ debellicize, dephallocratize, de-exoticize and democratize exploratory affect », in the words of Baptiste Morizot, to reassign him elsewhere. Landing it again, in short. In the infinitely small, the sweetness of everyday life, curiosity in the face of the vibrant power of life. Looking at the mountain no longer from above, but from our real place. Below, from the earth’s matrix.
This concern emerges within environmentalist struggles. By occupying the Grave glacier against a cable car project last fall, the Earth Uprisings affirmed that not all territory was intended to be developed. In a film currently being created, the YouTuber, Vincent Verzat, also calls for us to re-enchant our gaze. It invites you to explore the living world below your home, in the gaps that we leave for it. Go on an adventure right on your doorstep and go on the lookout.
