"Since the early 1970s, the human species, very unevenly, has begun to consume each year more resources than it replaces (or recycles)," recalls René Longet, author of "Planète Etat d’urgence: les réponses de la durabilité".
Fifty-three years ago, the Club of Rome, a foresight circle founded in 1968 by the humanist industrialist Aurelio Peccei (1908-1984), published its famous report "The Limits to Growth?". And even though it had indeed placed a question mark after the title of its report, distributed in nearly sixteen million copies and translated into about thirty languages, it was the first major challenge to the model of the Thirty Glorious Years.
Since then, it should have been clear that our prosperity, our economy, and all our activities would only have a future to the extent that they could fit within the productive capacities of natural systems. It is therefore quite naturally that the question was put to the Swiss people by way of an initiative on 9 February.
"Nature and its capacity for renewal constitute the limits imposed on the national economy. Economic activities may use resources and emit pollutants only insofar as the natural bases of life are preserved. The Confederation and the cantons ensure respect for this principle, taking into account in particular the social acceptability, in Switzerland and abroad, of the measures they adopt.The Confederation and the cantons shall ensure that, no later than 10 years after the article is accepted by the people and the cantons, the environmental impact resulting from consumption in Switzerland no longer exceeds the planetary boundaries, relative to the population of Switzerland. This provision applies in particular to climate change, loss of biological diversity, freshwater consumption, land use and inputs of nitrogen and phosphorus."
The planetary boundaries concept was devised as early as 2009 by Johan Rockström’s team at Stockholm University. Numbering nine, they concern climate change, impacts on biodiversity, soil degradation, nitrogen and phosphorus flows, freshwater use, ecotoxic substances, ocean acidification, the weakening of the ozone layer and atmospheric aerosol loading. The first six have now been transgressed, and the seventh is on its way to being so.
There is nothing there but an enumeration of our conditions of existence on Earth, regularly updated. Another way of measuring whether we remain within the framework of the physical, chemical and biological possibilities of our planet is the notion of ecological footprint, developed since the 1990s by the Basel native based in California, Mathis Wackernagel. It is the degree to which the productive capacity of territories is exceeded, whose needs are then met by other regions of the world or at the expense of future generations.
According to this index, since the early 1970s — at the very moment when the Club of Rome published its scenarios — the human species, very unequally at that, began to consume each year more resources than it regenerates (or that are recycled).
Until now, these situations have never been the subject of scientific controversy and naturally formed the basis of the notion of sustainable development, universally adopted in 1992 at the Earth Summit and defined in 1987 by the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development:
"A development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Two concepts are inherent in this definition: the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given, and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs."
The conventions on biodiversity, climate and desertification are direct outcomes.
In 2021, a Dutch expert in sustainability and systems thinking, associated with the Club of Rome, Gaya Herrington, compared various scenarios of evolution. She states: "The most likely conclusion to be drawn from my research is that humanity is on track to have limits to its growth imposed on it rather than to consciously choose its own limits", and she places the critical moment between 2030 and 2040. Fifty years after its breakthrough, the Club of Rome now notes that "we are in uncharted territory".
The vote of 9 February was supposed to be the occasion for a wide national debate on how to measure whether our activities are adequate to the capacities of natural systems. Unfortunately, that did not happen.
For the opponents of the initiative, its application amounted to the most complete utopia, even would bring us back to the candle era, even to the Stone Age, a fear expressly invoked by National Councillor Markus Ritter, president of the Swiss Farmers’ Union (reported in the weekly Agri of 18 October 2024).
Who knows how many more years we can still procrastinate before the acceleration of phenomena forces us to act in the face of the climate emergency, instead of simply talking about it without changing anything substantive?
As for Stéphanie Ruegsegger, Director of General Policy at the FER, she wrote on 10 January in L’AGEFI that the Swiss "would see their standard of living fall rapidly and substantially", like about fifteen countries not exceeding the planetary boundaries such as Haiti, Afghanistan or Madagascar.
Finally, La Liberté of 17 December 2024 quoted the co-president of the committee for the no, National Councillor Nicolas Kolly, as follows: "In the past, our societies have already experimented with the left's recipes in economic matters through attempts to implement communism, with the success we know."
Whether they were representatives of the economic world or political parties, many contented themselves with crying catastrophe and announcing the end of our prosperity. Conversely, for the proponents of the initiative, it is the disregard of the limits imposed by nature and the excessive exploitation of terrestrial resources that leads us to the real catastrophe.
This confrontation, a typical reflection of current polarization, remained without real transcendence: ecology or economy, one must choose … Yet it is the economy that must evolve to fit ecological realities and a hierarchy of needs, which has constituted the foundation of the notion of sustainability from the start.
There was clearly a lack of an implementation plan for the ten-year period granted by the initiative. It is clear that such implementation, in order to harmonize with nature, which since time immemorial rests on recycling — where nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed — requires appeals to sobriety in uses, renewable energies, the circular economy and technical optimizations. An equation that ETH Zurich calculated nearly 30 years ago in its so-called "2000-Watt Society" scenario, namely a division by three of energy consumption and a supply based three quarters on renewable energies.
Since then, through several energy and climate laws it has adopted, the Swiss people have even validated the option of all-electric, all-renewable — admittedly by 2050 and not 2035. But who knows how many more years we can still procrastinate before the acceleration of phenomena forces us to act in the face of the climate emergency, instead of simply talking about it without changing anything substantive?
Left without implementing legislation, Article 73 of our Constitution, entitled "Sustainable development", has largely been forgotten. But if we were to apply it, the vote of 9 February will not have been in vain!
A single example is enough to understand what could be put in place. Instead of having, as today, a car fleet that is ever heavier and wider (between 2012 and 2023, the average width of cars increased by 16 cm and their length by 6 cm), and with 50% of registrations being SUVs emitting 15% more CO₂, one could…
In doing so, it would be largely possible to divide the ecological footprint of the automobile by that famous factor of 3. And since the average renewal period of the car fleet is about fifteen years, it would be entirely conceivable to respect the desired time dynamics without too much difficulty.
Clearly, we are not ready yet; in the United States as in Europe, the mood is one of denial, perhaps also because we are confronted with abstract and schematic notions instead of debating concrete, systemic and positive scenarios for change.
But the debate is not over, because it so happens that our Constitution already contains, since its rewrite in 1999, an Article 73 entitled "Sustainable development": "The Confederation and the cantons work to establish a sustainable balance between nature, in particular its capacity for renewal, and its use by human beings."
Left without implementing legislation, this article has been largely forgotten. But if we were to apply it, the vote of 9 February will not have been in vain!
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