Agora des Savoirs

California on fire, Andalusia dried up, an urban system whose vulnerability is being realized during the Covid epidemic… The signs of a crisis of habitability of the Earth are multiplying. Globalized consumption patterns and the actions of predatory “geopowers” are obvious causes. How can we live differently? Geographer Michel Lussault reexamines this question that the Anthropocene forces us to think about in a new way. Contrary to fantasies of a return "to nature", he acknowledges the effects of widespread urbanization, which makes living spaces interdependent. Any search for autonomy is therefore an illusory path today. On the contrary, it is the links between human and non-human living beings and the materiality of their habitats that must be considered and cared for. Inspired by the ethics of Care, the author advocates for "inhabitant virtues" and the implementation of a "geo-care", the possible concrete scope of which he examines. Based on vivid stories, which take us from the misery of Vancouver's homeless to the Ojibwes' fight for the rights of wild rice or to the lithium mines of the Atacama Desert, it analyzes how, far from the reductive imagination of the world city, sustainable ways of coexisting are being experimented with.