THE EARTH SYSTEM FRESCO, V1.0

It’s such a great day to me, and a important one.

I’ve been working on many things since the COVID-19 crisis started, back in early 2020. Like many others, I started with curious, endless, passionate views of Jean-Marc Jancovici’s videos. It’s kinda hard not to start there if you’re French. The creator of Carbon Accounting is our local legend, and hell of a person, speaker, and very frank advisor. I started getting really invested when he first uploaded his courses at Fondation Mines ParisTech. 20 hours of detailed engineering course, of public utility and inspiration, what a slap in the face. Needless to say, I only have, like, less than 10% disagreement with him, only on societal views and history. I deeply admire him, and I owe him the spark which lit me, and a lot of my current ecological and energy knowledge.

I got more and more invested, and started getting to work on my own on Johann Rockström et al. planetary boundaries papers and work. The final enlightenment came from brilliant talks from Arthur Keller on complex system dynamics and the necessity to take a lot of recoil when analyzing the complexity of the impacts we have on our environment.

I then had to discover many (many) other people, talking, publishing on many (many) topics. I loved listening to Aurore STEPHANT’s brilliant talks on mining, refinement, ore processing, recycling and other limitations being pushed back… At a heavier and heavier price. She’s not the only one to talk about that: Philippe Bihouix. also gave me soooo much more to dig on, so much to know about material management, and a really sane and divergent view on the future of manufacturing, producing, and of course, on the digital sector, the one I’m working in.

Then I discovered so many other people more, that the list is too long to make. I began reading IPCC’s reports (hundreds of pages for summaries for policy makers, I’d still like to read at least one full report one day, but damn, 3500 pages is a lot). International Resource Panel (IRP) and other United Nations panels, too…

But my best chance is that I got to work within the comfidence of my current employer, who let me work on those topics, despite them being far away from my original skills.

And that’s the core of my concerns, here: legitimity. How? How can I aquire that? I do not work in mathematics fields, nor do I work in physics, in systemics, in biology, in climatology, paleontology, history of sciences, etc. Face it: I’m not a scientist, but I wanted to act, to do something positive. And the emergency is too high. There is no time. This is not about ego, this is not about money: this is about us, altogether, and we have to act now, we’re already late. And this is where I found my place: not as an expert (I’m certainly not, even though I could claim a little legitimity in the digital sector), but as a citizen. Not as someone who gets paid to work in a field, but as someone who wanted to share their knowledge on broad topics. Cause unfortunately, there is no expert in all those fields, all you can do is link everything, and find some rare people who make public speech about all that at once. So I decided that this would be my place: as a citizen who spends a lot of time, if now all their time, on ecological and society-wide, planetary problematics.

In a world of giants and defiance against acceptance of truth, I will be a hummingbird.

That’s when I also stumbled upon Aurélien Barrau’s powerful talks. I saw him evolve as I was, at a much faster pace, first talking about climate, then engaging on global approach, systemics and the philosophy of what we are, and the choices we now have to make for our society. I deeply enjoyed all of this talks (in addition to his course on the Universe, as he’s an astrophysician working on astroparticle physics, black holes and cosmology.

I then got to participate and become a facilitator of Climate Fresk and La Fresque du Numérique. Two brilliant workshops that I discovered, the original one being developed and created by Cédric Ringenbach.

I had to also start another new year at IUT du Limousin to be a teacher again, but this time for the first time in the new BUT diploma, freshly created by Université de Limoges. And I sensed that students were really interested in physics, climate, biology, and all planetary limits that we’re breaking.

But how to go one step inward? How to now be able to reach out a wider audience, especially people who are not connected to studying, science, but who might soon suffer from our civilization reaching its limits?

Then, one night, when I couldn’t sleep, the idea came to me: I had to create a fresco of my own. So I chose a name for it: The Earth System Fresco. So I began working on it, as I had already all the pieces in my head, and got to work. I caught a rhinopharyngitis (which happens a couple times every year), so I had nothing better to do than work on that. And here it is.

The Earth System Fresco is greatly inspired by all other similar workshops, and wants to go deeper than any other on Earth systemics, energy, life, society, and how natural resources are used by mankind.

Its purpose is to get in touch with all audiences through a 3-and-a-half-hour workshop, where participants collaborate to recreate an enlightened narration by working together, and learn a little about astrophysics, particle physics, systems, biology and ecology.

Everything is given with links, origin, sources and mentions.

All information is open, made accessible and easy to apprehend.

The whole workshop is only about science and society.

It’s made for everyone: individuals, structures, educational, organizations, companies… Anyone can attend. The purpose is to enpower earthlings about the very nature of their civilization.

And there you are!

I hope I can make this live. I willdrop the slides texts on GitHub, opening them to contribution. I’m just the creator of all this, I triple-checked everything, but might still be wrong (especially with my English translations).

The workshop is available in French and English. Anyone can animate it, as long as you’re certain that you truly master its concepts.

I have no idea where this can go, but I don’t want to create a structure to host and share it. It’s just free of use. If you want to go deeper on specific points, like Climate Change, you should probably apply to participate in a La Fresque du Climat workshop. We all started here.

Can’t wait to try it with the first people who will volunteer (I think some of my students are willing to try!).

See you in space!